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The Appendix ,;^

A new journal of narrative & experimental history

Executive Editor

Christopher Heaney

Managing Editor

Felipe Fernandes Cruz

Creative Editor

Benjamin Breen

Publisher

Brian Jones

The Appendix
Volume i, Issue 3

The Appendix is a quarterly journal
of experimental and narrative
history; though at times outlandish,
everything in its pages is as true
as the sources allow. The Appendix
solicits articles from historians,
writers, and artists committed to
good storytelling, with an eye for
the strange and a suspicion of both
jargon and traditional histories. A
creature of the web, its format takes
advantage of the flexibility of hyper-
text and modern web presentation
techniques to experiment with and
explore the process and method of
writing history.

Contributors

Amber Abbas
Will Buckingham
Veit Erlmann
Glynnis Fawkes
John C. Franklin
Timothy Fulford
Glenda Goodman
Mark Hailwood
Christopher Heaney
Brian Jones
JTW

Melissa Kagen
Miriam Kolar
Bernie Krause
Mary Caton Fingold
Jonathan Meiburg
Zoila S. Mendoza
Rachel Ozanne
Michael J. Schmidt
Danielle Skeehan
Chris A. Smith
Cameron B. Strang
Jonathan Webster

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The Appendix is published by The
Appendix, LLC, 1912 Riverview St.,
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Contributing Editors

Amy Kohout
Michael J. Schmidt

Copy Editor

Shannon Nagy

Design and Layout

Benjamin Breen
Brian Jones

Illustrations

Benjamin Breen

Founders

Benjamin Breen
Felipe Fernandes Cruz
Christopher Heaney
Brian Jones

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Appendix, LLC. All rights reserved;
reproduction in whole or in part
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CONTENTS

Out Loud

3 Letter from the Editors: Issue Three: Out Loud
5 Letters to The Appendix

7 Open Source: Happy Birds: Darwin on Avian Song

1 3 Field Notes: For the Sound of Her Voice

Amber Abbas

1 6 Tuned to the Senses:

An Archaeoacoustic Perspective on Ancient Chavin

Miriam Kolar

25 Deadly Notes: Atlantic Soundscapes
and the Writing of the Middle Passage

Danielle Skeehan

3 1 “Come hear this ditty”: Seventeenth-Century

Drinking Songs and the Challenges of Hearing the Past

Mark Hailwood

36 Psalms and Silence:

The Soundtrack of John Williams’s Captivity

Glenda Goodman

41 Supernatural Sound:

Science and Shamanism in the Arctic

Tim Fulford

49 “To Wait Together upon the Lord in Pure Silence”

Rachel Ozanne

53 Fiction Excerpt: The Descent of the Lyre

Will Buckingham

6 1 Solitude and Sandaya:

The Strange History of Pianos in Burma

Jonathan Webster

67 Listening to the Past: An African-American Lullaby

Mary Caton Lingold

74 Inside the American Museum of Natural History’s
Hidden Masterpiece

Jonathan Meiburg

87 Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to
Guantanamo

Melissa Kagen

92 Biophony and the Deep History of Sound

Bernie Krause

95 From Folklore to Exotica: Yma Sumac and the
Performance of Inca Identity

Zoila S. Mendoza

1 0 1 “Nancy Grows Up,” the Media Age, and the Historian’s
Craft

Michael J. Schmidt

1 07 Rules of the Tribe: Hardcore Punks and Hair Metal in the
1980 s

Chris A. Smith

1 1 6 Curculionidae: Scolytinae. A Parasitology of Sound

Veit Erlmann

1 1 9 Interview with Alexander Rose of the Long Now
Foundation: 10,000 Years Chiming

Christopher Heaney

1 26 Open Sound, Musical Curation, and the Delightful

Objectness of Wax: Interviews with Light in the Attic and
Clifford Allen

Michael J. Schmidt

1 36 Heavy Metal as Public History: A Review of Turisas, live
at the Gramercy Theater

Cameron B. Strang

1 4 1 Not-So-Lunny Pages: Kinyras

John C. Franklin and Glynnis Fawkes

1 57 Not-So-Lunny Pages: The Origins of the Blues

JTW

1 62 The Appendix, Appendixed.

Michael J. Schmidt and Brian Jones

Letter from the Editors

Issue Three: Out Loud

Orpheus Taming Wild Animals, Roman mosaic, 194 CE.

Wikimedia Commons

How can we know what the past sounds like?
When we record the present, what sounds do we
choose? And how will those choices change the
histories we tell in the future?

Historians are in the habit of using sensory met-
aphors to describe the past. In The Appendix’s pre-
vious editorial letter, for instance, we wrote about
“seeing history in our minds’ eyes, listening for its
voices, hearing its music.”

This, however, was a mistake.

What we see and hear are records of past events —
never the real thing. We might find a metaphor in
the Greek bronzes whose inlaid eyes of ruby, ivory,
or obsidian have been replaced by empty sockets.
Though the dead leave material traces in the fro-
zen faces of statues, in the words in books, or the
ghostly voices on LPs, perhaps the act of recording
failed to capture something fundamental about
their souls. What is true of the statues might be

true of every past life: we can never really look
them in the eye. And we can never hear their voice.

Or can we? Our contributors find many entry
points into the history of sound, reconstruct many
beginnings, and offer many answers to this ques-
tion. For the naturalist Bernie Krause, the history
of sound begins before the evolution of Homo sa-
piens, when our ancestors first developed a sonic
vocabulary of proto-language and proto-music
by imitating birdsong and other forms of “bioph-
ony” (a concept anticipated by Charles Darwin).
Taking myth as an alternate starting point, John
Franklin and Glynnis Fawkes offer a visual histo-
ry of a legendary lyre-player from Ancient Cyprus
who brought music to humanity, while Will Buck-
ingham re-imagines the Orphic legend in Bulgar-
ia. Other pieces zoom in to discover histories of
sound on a scale both miniature and momentous:
Michael Schmidt, for instance, reflects on a fa-
ther’s sonic record of his daughter’s childhood.

In tracing sonic histories, we have tried to em-

July 2013

brace a variety of perspectives. Perhaps the only
constant in these works is that they emphasize
the human aspect of sound — an essential starting
point, since (as the team responsible for the Clock
of the Long Now know all too well) a bell only
chimes in the desert if there are ears to hear it.

But the variety of modes of hearing, and the differ-
ent ways of producing and using sound in human
cultures, are dizzying. Sound can be a devastat-
ing weapon, as Melissa Kagen’s research into the
history of auditory torture demonstrates. Yet it
can also be a beacon of humanity, intimacy, and
warmth: in our Field Notes feature, Amber Abbas
offers a personal reflection on the voice of her
grandmother and how it has sustained her memo-
ry even after her death, while for Mark Hailwood,
early modern drinking songs offer a window into
vanished worlds of camaraderie.

Part of what makes music so important to human
societies is that it can cross cultures, even as it re-
tains some essential element of its creator. Mary
Caton Lingold studies the creole song of an en-
slaved woman, reconstructing its social function
in part by learning how to sing it herself. Jonathan
Webster shows how the import of pianos into
nineteenth-century Burma created a unique mu-
sical culture that turned a symbol of Western clas-
sicism into a medium for a distinctively Burmese
cultural expression. Zoila Mendoza traces the
musical legacy of a Peruvian singer and her sig-
nificance as an indigenous woman on the world
stage. And moving to 1980s San Francisco, Chris
Smith ponders what happens when a band that
forged its persona in a tiny musical subculture
tries to move beyond its roots.

William Butler Yeats wrote that “an aged man is
but a paltry thing ... unless Soul clap its hands
and sing.” For the poet, as for so many, song was a
form of redemption, a means by which a soul “fas-
tened to a dying animal” could escape its cage and
become purified, redeemed, even immortal. Sev-
eral of our pieces explore the interstices of song,
religion, and identity. Glenda Goodman writes
about a Puritan minister kidnapped by Indian
and French raiders whose memories of Psalms
were what held him together as his life collapsed
around him — and whose musical prejudices led
him to vilify the French Catholics who tried to

4 The Appendix Out Loud

convert him even more than his native captors.
Moving across the Atlantic to Africa, Danielle
Skeehan shows us how songs helped newly-cap-
tured slaves retain their identities in the holds of
the Middle Passage.

Despite the richness inherent in histories of
song, however, we tried to resist allowing music
to dominate the issue. Human-created melodies,
after all, are just a tiny outcrop on a vast glacier
of sound: from the beating of our own hearts in
our chests to the inarticulate calls of animals,
most of what we hear is not music, but noise. Jon-
athan Meiburg takes us to the half-hidden Hall of
Birds in the American Museum of Natural History,
where living birdsong has been replaced by silent,
stuffed mementos. Timothy Fulford writes about
the haunting sounds of the Arctic Circle, where
early nineteenth-century Europeans found that
human voices were transformed by natural phe-
nomena they didn’t understand, and by the seem-
ingly miraculous powers of Inuit shamans. And
Rachel Ozanne brings us a history not of sound,
but of its absence.

Not all of the pieces in this issue will harmonize,
but maybe that’s the point: there’s as much to
learn in cacophony as in melody.

We hope you enjoy this exploration of sound over
the coming months— and will tune in again on
October 1 for our more improvised next issue, our
first with no theme.

Your Appendix editors,

Benjamin Breen
Felipe Cruz
Christopher Heaney
Brian Jones

These songs were on repeat for us while we
pulled this issue together:

Benjamin Breen

John Maus — "Hey Moon"

Felipe Cruz

Os Mutantes — "Panis et Circensis"

Christopher Heaney

Linda Ronstadt— "Willin'"

Brian Jones

Texas Tornados— "Soy de San Luis"

Letters to The Appendix

Welcome to The Appendix letters page, where we offer letters from the past.
In honor of this issue’s theme, we’ve scoured magazines and newspapers in
search 0/ dispatches related to music and sound — including some teenage
voices in praise of an up-and-coming band called “the Rolling Stones,” an
1801 report of a curious Persian dance on the Russian steppe, and a traueler’s
lamentation from 1950s New Orleans.

As always, we hope they inspire you to write letters of your own — to The
Appendix and to parties deserving and otherwise.

— The Editors

“Hear That Big Sound,” Life Magazine,
11 June 1965, 25.

Sirs:

I am one 15-year-old girl to whom this so-
called big sound is more like nerve shattering.
All these groups do is make weird sounds, like
my 8-year-old brother makes free of charge.

DENISE MURRAY
Framingham, Mass.

Sirs:

I must disagree with your phrase, “As of this
week her favorite group is the Rolling Stones.”
I have been president of their Chicago fan
club for over a year now. And the Stones are
neither “scruffy” nor “surly.”

Also, I consider my greatest so-called “trou-
ble” at a teen concert to be Jan. 29, when I met
an adorable long-haired Stones fan named
Barry, whom I have not been able to locate
since.

TRISH FOLLETT
Lombard, 111 .

“One Hand Claps,” Black Belt, July
1966, 66.

As Mr. Kei Tsumura says in his article on Hai-
ku poetry (May, 1966), the Haiku which con-
tains the lines, “... the mighty ovation/Of one
hand clapping,” may be expressing disillu-
sionment about the fleeting glory of death on
the battlefield. On the other hand, the sound
of one hand clapping reverberates through
Koan exercises used in the enlightenment of
Zen Buddhists.

Whatever is that sound — and it may be as the
image reflected by an empty mirror — it is no
more the sound of futility than is the roar of
waves beating endlessly against the beaches
of the oceans of the world. It will be the sound
both of the final implosion of this universe
and the explosion beginning the next. Any-
way, it’s not futility.

CHRISTOPHER DUNCAN
Jeffersonville, Ind.

''l\*

July 2013

“Description of the Wardish-Game,
or Public Gymnastic Exercises of the
Persians,” Monthly Magazine and Brit-
ish Register 9 (July 1, 1801) : 543-544.

I had some time ago an opportunity here in
Astrachan of being present at a Persian spec-
tacle; which I recollect to have before seen in
Masanderan, but not so perfect ...

The Wardish-players usually assemble very
early in the morning; and as soon as a suf-
ficient number is arrived, the exercises
commence. The players, having previously
stripped themselves quite naked, and put on a
pair of wide breeches reaching no lower than
the knee, step forth to the sound of the music
into the middle of the arena; and then their
gymnastic exercises begin in the following
manner: They first all place themselves in a
row on their heads and feet, and endeavour
by stretchings and distortions of the body,
during which some times the most indecent
postures occur, to rend every part thereof
more pliant. They all at once jump up, form
a circle, hold one foot up, and hop round in
a circle on the other, whilst with both hands
they incessantly strike their thighs. After this
they alter their position, so that, instead of
going round in a circle, they hop in a straight
line from one end of the arena to the other,
either across or lengthwise, and as often as
they approach the wall, they beat time to the
music by striking backwards with one of their
feet a board leaning against it ...

The chief art of the Wardish game consists
in this, that all the movements of the body
are regulated by the music. There are there-
fore particular masters who give instructions
in the art: and it is generally believed, that it
is an exercise beneficial not only to those in
health, but likewise to invalids, especially to
such as labour under diseases arising from an
obstructed perspiration.

M. VON HABLITZ’L
Petersburg, Russia

Though not a proper letter to the editor, we
also wanted to share Issue 3 guest editor Mi-
chael Schmidt’s archival find: an August 6,
1949 letter from Hugues Panassie (probably
the most influential jazz critic before 1945)
responding to interview questions from a
German collector and pianist, Gunter Boas.
In fractured English, Boas eagerly inquires
about his correspondent’s recent trip to New
Orleans, only to be rebuffed by a rather dis-
appointed-sounding Panassie, who, remark-
ably, complains that Mardi Gras prevented
him from hearing brass bands!

Dear Mr. Panassie how is the situation with the
REAL JAZZ in New Orleans today? Have You heard
some brass bands? Please tell me some impressions
You had in New Orleans.

I did not hear any brass band. I only stayed
one day in N.O. and it was the Mardi-Gras, so
I did not hear much. I only heard there Louis
[Armstrong’s] band and Cousin Joe, who is a
great blues singer.

During the Mardi-Gras, I heard through a
loud-speaker a trumpet player who sounded
a lot like King Oliver and Tommy Lednier but
could not locate him. Some people told me
that there was still fine N.O. style musicians
in N.O. but in most of the night-clubs you
only hear the current “modern” stuff. What is
left in the South is mostly great blues singers.

Have you visit [sic] the Nick’s and Condon’s? Who
was playing there?

I did not go Nick’s but I went to Condon’s. I
don’t like that kind of music. Wild Bill David-
son, Ralph Sutton, Arthur Troppier, Peanuts
Huckoo, George Bruenie were playing at Gor-
don’s. I did not like the band at all.

The Appendix Out Loud

•1-J1Z i.’MJJ :« A

Happy Birds: Darwin on Avian Song

In the beginning was the Squawk, and the Squawk
was with Song, and the Squawk was Sony.

We humans were not the jirst to communicate. In
/act, as we explore in this issue of The Appendix,
we may haue learned how to communicate usiny
sound/rom our distant relatives and predecessors, the
animal species that populated Earth for hundreds of
millions of years before us. Specifically, birds, whose
evolution likely began from dinosaurs in the Jurassic.

For the Open Source 0/ our ‘Out Loud’ issue, we’ve
selected a passage from a thinker whose work briny s
out the bird-to-human evolutionary connection: the
Englishman Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Thouyh
hardly obscure, Darwin’s work is not often read in
the oriyinal. This is a shame, as Darwin was not just
the naturalist whom we most associate with natural
selection and evolution, but also a fascinatingly con-
troversial observer of humanity.*

The following passage is taken/rom The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, pub-
lished in 1871, which aryued that humans are ani-
mals, and that sexual selection explains the seeming-
ly impractical features 0/ humans and animals alike.
Althouyh subsequent scholars have questioned some
of Darwin’s conclusions (aryuiny that sex was also
important as a social/unction, and thatyarish colors
and behaviors also served as warniny mechanisms)
perhaps the most radical implications of the work lay
in the realm of race. Darwin was a staunch proponent
of the idea that human races were of the same species,
not of different species as many race scientists of the
nineteenth century claimed, and that exterior differ-
ences were superficial.

Yet as the following passage shows, even while writ-
ing about birds, Darwin was a man of his time. He
held firm views on the differences between civilization
and savagery in their customs, and between the roles
of males and females. Whether or not Darwin chan-
neled racist prejudice or happily anticipated the ex-
tinction of “savage races," he indeed asked questions
that would soon be put to darker interpretations, such
as Social Darwinism, and what came to be called eu-
yenics.

This passaye, however, sings with briyht insight,
some teasing am biyuity, and some very /unny
ylimpses of the behavior of nineteenth-century natu-
ral historians. (It seems that English scientists swung
birdcages about their heads with some regularity.)

“Alfred Russel Wallace also developed the theory of evolution by natural selection through his research in the Amazon and the
Malay Peninsula. Wallace sent Darwin a paper, "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," which
prompted Darwin to write up his own theories, which became On the Origin of the Species, published in 1 859. Wallace's
theories subtly differed from Darwin — Darwin emphasized competition, and Wallace emphasized adaptation to the natural
environmental system — but Wallace's fame as natural selection's co-revealer faded after his death. He was poor and an outsid-
er. In recent years, however, there has been a well-deserved spate of critical interest in Wallace and his work, including Daniel
Mason's magical short work of historical fiction, "The ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace."

July 2013

Though ostensibly about birds and their vocal and instru-
mental music, it is as much about human interaction, and
the emotion, /ear, and sexual attraction that humans and
birds share. Be it romanticism or insight, Darwin himself
leaues the door open for argument. The facts are one thing,
but when it comes to interpretation — of theory, of song —
we might chalk up our different opinions on Darwin to that
underestimated but delightful factor of natural history:
taste.

One person’s savage notes are another’s symphony.

Vocal and Instrumental Music*

ith birds the voice serves to express var-
ious emotions, such as distress, fear,
anger, triumph, or mere happiness. It
is apparently sometimes used to excite
terror, as in the case of the hissing noise
made by some nestling-birds. Audubon
relates that a night-heron (Ardea nycti corax, Linn.),
which he kept tame, used to hide itself when a cat
approached, and then “suddenly start up uttering
one of the most frightful cries, apparently enjoy-
ing the cat’s alarm and flight.” The common do-
mestic cock clucks to the hen, and the hen to her
chickens, when a dainty morsel is found. The hen,
when she has laid an egg, “repeats the same note
very often, and concludes with the sixth above,
which she holds for a longer time”; and thus she
expresses her joy. Some social birds apparent-
ly call to each other for aid; and as they flit from
tree to tree, the flock is kept together by chirp an-
swering chirp. During the nocturnal migrations of
geese and other water-fowl, sonorous clangs from
the van may be heard in the darkness overhead,
answered by clangs in the rear. Certain cries serve
as danger signals, which, as the sportsman knows
to his cost, are understood by the same species
and by others. The domestic cock crows, and the
humming-bird chirps, in triumph over a defeated
rival. The true song, however, of most birds and
various strange cries are chiefly uttered during the
breeding-season, and serve as a charm, or merely

*The following passage is taken from Charles Darwin, The
Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, London:
John Murrary, 1 871 , pp. 51-68. Although Darwin was
meticulous with his sources, we've mostly removed his
footnotes for space considerations.

as a call-note, to the other sex.

Naturalists are much divided with respect to the
object of the singing of birds. Few more careful
observers ever lived than Montagu, and he main-
tained that the “males of songbirds and of many
others do not in general search for the female,
but, on the contrary, their business in the spring is
to perch on some conspicuous spot, breathing out
their full and armorous notes, which, by instinct,
the female knows, and repairs to the spot to choose
her mate.” Mr. Jenner Weir informs me that this is
certainly the case with the nightingale. Bechstein,
who kept birds during his whole life, asserts, “that
the female canary always chooses the best sing-
er, and that in a state of nature the female finch
selects that male out of a hundred whose notes
please her most.” There can be no doubt that birds
closely attend to each other’s song. Mr. Weir has
told me of the case of a bullfinch which had been
taught to pipe a German waltz, and who was so
good a performer that he cost ten guineas; when
this bird was first introduced into a room where
other birds were kept and he began to sing, all the
others, consisting of about twenty linnets and ca-
naries, ranged themselves on the nearest side of
their cages, and listened with the greatest interest
to the new performer. Many naturalists believe
that the singing of birds is almost exclusively “the
effect of rivalry and emulation,” and not for the
sake of charming their mates. This was the opin-
ion of Daines Barrington and White of Selborne,
who both especially attended to this subject. Bar-
rington, however, admits that “superiority in song
gives to birds an amazing ascendancy over others,
as is well known to bird-catchers.”

It is certain that there is an intense degree of rivalry
between the males in their singing. Bird-fanciers
match their birds to see which will sing longest;
and I was told by Mr. Yarrell that a first-rate bird
will sometimes sing till he drops down almost
dead, or according to Bechstein, quite dead from
rupturing a vessel in the lungs. Whatever the cause
may be, male birds, as I hear from Mr. Weir, often
die suddenly during the season of song. That the
habit of singing is sometimes quite independent
of love is clear, for a sterile, hybrid canary-bird has
been described as singing whilst viewing itself in a
mirror, and then dashing at its own image; it like-
wise attacked with fury a female canary, when put

The Appendix Out Loud

into the same cage. The jealousy excited by
the act of singing is constantly taken advan-
tage of by bird-catchers; a male in good song,
is hidden and protected, whilst a stuffed bird,
surrounded by limed twigs, is exposed to
view. In this manner, as Mr. Weir informs me,
a man has in the course of a single day caught
fifty, and in one instance, seventy, male chaf-
finches. The power and inclination to sing
differ so greatly with birds that although the
price of an ordinary male chaffinch is only
sixpence, Mr. Weir saw one bird for which the
bird-catcher asked three pounds; the test of
a really good singer being that it will contin-
ue to sing whilst the cage is swung round the
owner’s head.

That male birds should sing from emulation
as well as for charming the female, is not at
all incompatible; and it might have been ex-
pected that these two habits would have con-
curred, like those of display and pugnacity.

Some authors, however, argue that the song
of the male cannot serve to charm the female,
because the females of some few species,
such as of the canary, robin, lark, and bull-
finch, especially when in a state of widow-
hood, as Bechstein remarks, pour forth fairly
melodious strains. In some of these cases the
habit of singing may be in part attributed to
the females having been highly fed and con-
fined, for this disturbs all the functions con-
nected with the reproduction of the species.
Many instances have already been given of the
partial transference of secondary masculine
characters to the female, so that it is not at
all surprising that the females of some spe-
cies should possess the power of song. It has
also been argued, that the song of the male
cannot serve as a charm, because the males
of certain species, for instance of the robin,
sing during the autumn. But nothing is more
common than for animals to take pleasure
in practising whatever instinct they follow

Aquatint of the Fox River by Karl Bodmer, 1 839.

Wikimedia Commons

/ r a'T® D r

WT'-f-

( I V. \ f V

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July 2013

at other times for some real good. How often do
we see birds which fly easily, gliding and sailing
through the air obviously for pleasure? The cat
plays with the captured mouse, and the cormo-
rant with the captured fish. The weaver-bird (Plo-
ceus), when confined in a cage, amuses itself by
neatly weaving blades of grass between the wires
of its cage. Birds which habitually fight during the
breeding-season are generally ready to fight at all
times; and the males of the capercailzie some-
times hold their Balzen or leks at the usual place
of assemblage during the autumn. Hence it is not
at all surprising that male birds should continue
singing for their own amusement after the season
for courtship is over.

As shown in a previous chapter, singing is to a
certain extent an art, and is much improved by
practice. Birds can be taught various tunes, and
even the unmelodious sparrow has learnt to sing
like a linnet. They acquire the song of their foster
parents, and sometimes that of their neighbours.
All the common songsters belong to the Order of
Insessores, and their vocal organs are much more
complex than those of most other birds; yet it is
a singular fact that some of the Insessores, such
as ravens, crows, and magpies, possess the prop-
er apparatus, though they never sing, and do not
naturally modulate their voices to any great ex-
tent. Hunter asserts that with the true songsters
the muscles of the larynx are stronger in the males
than in the females; but with this slight excep-
tion there is no difference in the vocal organs of
the two sexes, although the males of most species
sing so much better and more continuously than
the females.*

It is remarkable that only small birds properly
sing. The Australian genus Menura, however, must
be excepted; for the Menura alberti, which is about
the size of a half-grown turkey, not only mocks
other birds, but “its own whistle is exceedingly
beautiful and varied.” The males congregate and
form “corroborying places,” where they sing, rais-
ing and spreading their tails like peacocks, and
drooping their wings. It is also remarkable that
birds which sing well are rarely decorated with

*Dureau de la Malle gives a curious instance ( Annales des
Sc. Nat., 3rd series, Zoolog., tom. x., p. 118) of some wild
blackbirds in his garden in Paris, which naturally learnt a
republican air from a caged bird.

brilliant colours or other ornaments. Of our Brit-
ish birds, excepting the bullfinch and goldfinch,
the best songsters are plain-coloured. The king-
fisher, bee-eater, roller, hoopoe, wood-peckers,
&c., utter harsh cries; and the brilliant birds of the
tropics are hardly ever songsters. Hence bright co-
lours and the power of song seem to replace each
other. We can perceive that if the plumage did not
vary in brightness, or if bright colours were dan-
gerous to the species, other means would be em-
ployed to charm the females; and melody of voice
offers one such means.

It is often difficult to conjecture whether the many
strange cries and notes uttered by male birds
during the breeding-season serve as a charm or
merely as a call to the female. The soft cooing of
the turtle-dove and of many pigeons, it may be
presumed, pleases the female. When the female
of the wild turkey utters her call in the morning,
the male answers by a note which differs from the
gobling noise made, when with erected feathers,
rustling wings and distended wattles, he puffs
and struts before her. The spel of the black-cock
certainly serves as a call to the female, for it has
been known to bring four or five females from a
distance to a male under confinement; but as the
black-cock continues his spel for hours during
successive days, and in the case of the caper-
cailzie “with an agony of passion,” we are led to
suppose that the females which are present are
thus charmed. The voice of the common rook is
known to alter during the breeding-season, and
is therefore in some way sexual. But what shall
we say about the harsh screams of, for instance,
some kinds of macaws; have these birds as bad
taste for musical sounds as they apparently have
for colour, judging by the inharmonious contrast
of their bright yellow and blue plumage? It is in-
deed possible that without any advantage being
thus gained, the loud voices of many male birds
may be the result of the inherited effects of the
continued use of their vocal organs when excited
by the strong passions of love, jealousy and rage;
but to this point we shall recur when we treat of
quadrupeds.

The Appendix Out Loud

We have as yet spoken only of the voice, but
the males of various birds practise, during
their courtship, what may be called instru-
mental music. Peacocks and birds of para-
dise rattle their quills together. Turkey-cocks
scrape their wings against the ground, and
some kinds of grouse thus produce a buzz-
ing sound. Another North American grouse,
the Tetrao umbellus, when with his tail erect,
his ruffs displayed, “he shows off his finery
to the females, who lie hid in the neighbour-
hood,” drums by rapidly striking his wings
together above his back, according to Mr. R.
Haymond, and not, as Audubon thought, by
striking them against his sides. The sound
thus produced is compared by some to dis-
tant thunder, and by others to the quick roll
of a drum. The female never drums, “but
flies directly to the place where the male is
thus engaged.” The male of the Kalij -pheas-
ant, in the Himalayas, often makes a singular
drumming noise with his wings, not unlike
the sound produced by shaking a stiff piece
of cloth.” On the west coast of Africa the lit-
tle black-weavers (Ploceus?) congregate in a
small party on the bushes round a small open
space, and sing and glide through the air with
quivering wings, “which make a rapid whir-
ring sound like a child’s rattle.” One bird af-
ter another thus performs for hours togeth-
er, but only during the courting-season. At
this season, and at no other time, the males
of certain night-jars (Caprimukjus) make a
strange booming noise with their wings. The
various species of woodpeckers strike a sono-
rous branch with their beaks, with so rapid a
vibratory movement that “the head appears
to be in two places at once.” The sound thus
produced is audible at a considerable dis-
tance but cannot be described; and I feel
sure that its source would never be conjec-
tured by any one hearing it for the first time.
As this jarring sound is made chiefly during
the breeding-season, it has been considered
as a love-song; but it is perhaps more strict-
ly a love-call. The female, when driven from
her nest, has been observed thus to call her
mate, who answered in the same manner and

"The male hoopoe... first draws in air, and then taps the end of its beak
perpendicularly down against a stone or the trunk of a tree."

Wikimedia Commons

soon appeared. Lastly, the male hoopoe (Up-
up a epops) combines vocal and instrumental
music; for during the breeding-season this
bird, as Mr. Swinhoe observed, first draws in
air, and then taps the end of its beak perpen-
dicularly down against a stone or the trunk of
a tree, “when the breath being forced down
the tubular bill produces the correct sound.”
If the beak is not thus struck against some ob-
ject, the sound is quite different. Air is at the
same time swallowed, and the oesophagus
thus becomes much swollen; and this proba-
bly acts as a resonator, not only with the hoo-
poe, but with pigeons and other birds.

In the foregoing cases sounds are made by
the aid of structures already present and oth-
erwise necessary; but in the following cases
certain feathers have been specially modified
for the express purpose of producing sounds.
The drumming, bleating, neighing, or thun-
dering noise (as expressed by different ob-
servers) made by the common snipe (Scolopax
gallinago) must have surprised every one who
has ever heard it. This bird, during the pair-
ing-season, flies to “perhaps a thousand feet
in height,” and after zig-zagging about for a
time descends to the earth in a curved line,
with outspread tail and quivering pinions,
and surprising velocity. The sound is emitted

1 1

July 2013

only during this rapid descent. No one was
able to explain the cause until M. Meves ob-
served that on each side of the tail the outer
feathers are peculiarly formed, having a stiff
sabre-shaped shaft with the oblique barbs of
unusual length, the outer webs being strongly
bound together. He found that by blowing on
these feathers, or by fastening them to a long
thin stick and waving them rapidly through
the air, he could reproduce the drumming
noise made by the living bird. Both sexes are
furnished with these feathers, but they are
generally larger in the male than in the fe-
male, and emit a deeper note. In some spe-
cies, as in S. frenata, four feathers, and in
S. jauensis, no less than eight on each side of
the tail are greatly modified. Different tones
are emitted by the feathers of the different
species when waved through the air; and the
Scolopox imlsonii of the United States makes a
switching noise whilst descending rapidly to
the earth.

Lastly, in several species of a sub-genus of
Pipra or manakin, the males, as described by
Mr. Sclater, have their secondary wing-feath-
ers modified in a still more remarkable man-
ner. In the brilliantly-coloured P. deliciosa the
first three secondaries are thick-stemmed
and curved towards the body; in the fourth
and fifth the change is greater; and in the
sixth and seventh the shaft “is thickened to an
extraordinary degree, forming a solid horny
lump.” The barbs also are greatly changed in
shape, in comparison with the corresponding
feathers in the female. Even the bones of the
wing, which support these singular feathers
in the male, are said by Mr. Fraser to be much
thickened. These little birds make an extraor-
dinary noise, the first “sharp note being not
unlike the crack of a whip.”

The diversity of the sounds, both vocal and in-
strumental, made by the males of many birds
during the breeding-season, and the diversity
of the means for producing such sounds, are
highly remarkable. We thus gain a high idea
of their importance for sexual purposes, and

are reminded of the conclusion arrived at as to
insects. It is not difficult to imagine the steps
by which the notes of a bird, primarily used as
a mere call or for some other purpose, might
have been improved into a melodious love
song. In the case of the modified feathers, by
which the drumming, whistling, or roaring
noises are produced, we know that some birds
during their courtship flutter, shake, or rattle
their unmodified feathers together; and if the
females were led to select the best perform-
ers, the males which possessed the strongest
or thickest, or most attenuated feathers, sit-
uated on any part of the body, would be the
most successful; and thus by slow degrees
the feathers might be modified to almost any
extent. The females, of course, would not no-
tice each slight successive alteration in shape,
but only the sounds thus produced. It is a cu-
rious fact that in the same class of animals,
sounds so different as the drumming of the
snipe’s tail, the tapping of the woodpecker’s
beak, the harsh trumpet-like cry of certain
water-fowl, the cooing of the turtle-dove,
and the song of the nightingale, should all be
pleasing to the females of the several species.
But we must not judge of the tastes of distinct
species by a uniform standard; nor must we
judge by the standard of man’s taste. Even
with man, we should remember what discor-
dant noises, the beating of tom-toms and the
shrill notes of reeds, please the ears of savag-
es. Sir S. Baker remarks, that “as the stomach
of the Arab prefers the raw meat and reeking
liver taken hot from the animal, so does his
ear prefer his equally coarse and discordant
music to all other.”

The Appendix Out Loud

For the Sound of Her Voice

Amber Abbas

My grandmother’s voice was not sweet. It did
not tell bedtime stories or offer advice. It grated,
barked orders. As a child, the only thing it said
that I could understand was something like, “very
good,” uttered when I came downstairs for break-
fast, jet-lagged and starving, during our family
vacations in Pakistan. I always took that “bahut ac-
cha” [very good] to mean “You look pretty today!”
I would smile shyly, hug my grandmother, and
sit down in my spot at the other end of the table,
usually on one of the stools shaped like giant dice.
Fried eggs and kabobs would follow, or my favor-
ite puris with coarse sugar.

These meals were full of voices, most of which I
could not understand. There was Amma Rasoola,
the cook, shouting from the kitchen; Baji, my
father’s older sister, sweating from the heat and
calling in a diabetic wheeze for extra green chilies.
Bleary-eyed cousins whining for omelette. Chai!
Pani! Rasoola! Rasoola! We sat for hours around
this table, eating in shifts as waves of family awoke
or arrived in celebration of our visit from abroad.
These hours were filled with laughter, stories,
plans, and more chai, more chai. They are happy
memories, punctuated by anxieties of disorien-
tation, the impossibility of conversation, and an
upset stomach.

Through it all cut my grandmother’s voice,
scratchy and shrill (its harshness the result of a
decades-ago thyroid surgery). It became a mystery
for me to unravel. After years of partly loathing
those trips to Pakistan, the sound of her voice led
me to dedicate myself to learning Urdu, listening

to the stories of my family members and others
who remembered the terrible days of the Indian
partition when they left homes in India for the
promises of a Pakistan that was as yet unknown
and unknowable.

Voices have since become the core of my research
on the Indian partition and the creation of Pa-
kistan. I have interviewed over seventy people,
made recordings I have listened to again and
again, transcribed and read and re-read. Tran-
scribing is hard and time-consuming, but reading
a transcript is easier (read: faster) than listening
to a full interview.

Yet, when I find something in a transcript that I
want to use, I almost always return to the audio
first. The recording offers context as the tran-
script almost never does. In early 2008 I recorded
four sisters in the days after the assassination of
Benazir Bhutto, and the birds chirping in the gar-
den that January morning belie the somber tone
of our meeting. The hum of an air conditioner or a
ceiling fan reminds me of the heat during a partic-
ular interview; a narrator’s constant sneezing and
sniffling speaks to his generosity as he spoke with
me despite suffering a terrible allergic attack. The
sound, then, brings the conversation alive and
reminds me, as a researcher, how fundamentally
different this work is than my work in the archive.

Above all, though, the meaning, forme, resides in
the voice. It is there that I first and finally come to
understand the story. The voice hesitates before a
painful memory; it spills mirth when remember-

An audio excerpt of Amber Abbas's interview with her
grandmother is available at http://appendic.es/m/n

July 2013

Begum Birjis Abbas, the grandmother of the author.

ing childhood mischief. I can hear it smile, or
stifle a smile, or signal tears about to come.
The voices of my narrators betray their age,
breathing heavily, or coughing, or laughing;
the physical and emotional strain of the ex-
perience is captured on the tape. The voice
communicates the texture of life’s experi-
ence, sometimes smooth, sometimes coarse.
One narrator recounted his life story in a near
whisper, and I have since come to understand
it as a story thick with regret. Some people
nearly shout as they defend their choices,
producing evidence (I let the recording run
as they leave the room, return with crackling
sheaves of paper); many speak slowly, and
carefully, cognizant of the recording, the pub-
lic telling of a private tale. The voice, with its
stops and starts, guides the story, embodies
it.

My young cousin became interested in the
interviews I was doing. Twice a week in 2005
and 2006 I interviewed our great uncle, a re-
tired general, and when I came home, my
cousin would ask, “What did he say?” As I re-
counted the stories, we sometimes consulted
our grandmother, our Dadi; her versions were
sometimes different. The general’s beloved
uncle and mentor was , to her, a man who hat-
ed education for girls, and the reason she had
to sneak her younger sisters out to school.
She herself was only educated at home, by a
governess, but the English she learned then
had long since faded.

I have interviewed over seventy people in
three countries, but I only interviewed my
grandmother once. The story she told was
relational, profoundly gendered, and tells a
story of perpetual disruption.

The Appendix Out Loud

What do you remember about your house in
Aligarh?

I remember our house. My father’s broth-
er, my father’s mother, my father’s father;
my uncle, my grandmother, my grandfa-
ther. My father’s sisters.

I asked about her house,
but she told us about home.

She clears her throat. It sounds like choking.

Do you remember any special story?

I don’t remember any special story. My
grandfather, my father, everyone lived
together. Everyone lived together in one
house. I was twelve ... when my grand-
father died. I was only twelve when my
grandfather died.

After she tells us how important it was for ev-
eryone to be together, recounting a long list
of relatives showing how large and close her
family was, she marks the first disruption.
She was twelve when all of that changed.

When did you meet Vakil Sahib (our grandfa-
ther)?

He lived there. He was in the College. He
lived in our house. He was from outside,
from Nagpur, Nagpur. After, he came for
the wedding. He came to get married.

Did you rnant to come to Pakistan?

No. When everyone came, everyone from
the house had come. They also brought
me. I could not stay alone. They brought
me, too.

A sigh, more like a heave.

This is one of the only interviews I have ever
done in which a narrator says, “No.” Did she
consider staying? Did she want to stay?

There is a long silence.

What do you remember about Vakil Sahib? We
didn’t know him, we don’t remember him.
Hainh? What do I remember? He was
good, he was a good man. He was very
beautiful, very admirable. He played
bridge. He went to the Club. He played
bridge a lot.

I laugh.

My father tells stories about riding his
bicycle to pick up his father from the bridge
tables at two in the morning. He never told
me that it was because my grandfather was
so good at bridge!

When he mas gone, what did you do?

Nothing. I kept sitting in our house, with
the children, with the children.

When your sons went to America, were you sad?

I was so distressed. It was so distressing.
They didn’t communicate. Communica-
tion was abandoned ... It was so distress-
ing. They were all alone.

She sounds troubled remembering this. I
am evidence of that departure, that aban-
donment, but also the reconnection that
followed, though neither of these sons lived
again in Pakistan. And then, having remem-
bered it, she’s done. Bas. Enough. She tells us
to turn off the tape.

I only interviewed my grandmother once be-
fore she died in 2007, but it is her voice that
I hear in my head, with all of her tics, her
groans, her wheezes. It is not a beautiful
voice, but it was, it is, my muse.

July 2013

Tuned to the Senses:

An Archaeoacoustic Perspective on
Ancient Chavin

Miriam Kolar

Sound and Archaeology

Buttressed into the Peruvian Andes, the ancient
mortared-stone complex at Chavin de Huantar
resonates with sound and story. Visitors to this
3,000-year-old ceremonial center frequently don’t
notice the isolating silence and surprising reso-
nances of its labyrinthine interior architecture.
Site acoustics don’t stand out in the conspicuous
manner of reverberant cathedrals, and architec-
tural sound isn’t something most people pay at-
tention to anyway, since we’re used to tuning out
background noise.

Sound, both heard and felt, dynamically connects
us to the physical world through sensory and
cognitive interaction. We’re not always thinking
about what we hear or feel, yet sound is an en-
vironmental channel for information about the
world around us. Sonic experience is most obvi-
ously rooted in listening, but it’s not only about
the ears, and individual background and attention
shape many aspects of our perception of sound.

Over the past six years, I’ve measured Chavin’s
acoustics and conducted human auditory per-
ceptual experiments aimed at understanding the
role sound played at ancient Chavin. “Integrative
archaeoacoustics” brings together tools and tech-
niques from acoustics, audio engineering, percep-
tual psychology, anthropology, computer science,
and other fields in a novel approach to exploring
ephemeral aspects of past life. In my work, scien-
tific method guides theory and measurement, but
I have to consider the subjective possibilities that
physical dynamics — such as acoustics — create
for human experience. If I were to summarize my
expertise, I might say “cultural acoustics.” I focus
on understanding how sound influences people,
what people do with sound, and what this means
for humans as individuals and social beings.

Archaeologists toe a wavering line: as profession-
als, we strive to present a transparent account of
our explorations and discoveries, but at the same
time, we’re compelled to create narratives that ex-
plain our activities and motivations. We report on
findings, produce interpretations. Sometimes we
find ways to communicate the ambiguities of this
terrain, but often our interpretations are mistak-
en for direct knowledge of the ancient past. How-
ever archaeological findings might be presented
and understood, material culture is the entryway.
With its well-preserved architecture and intact,
sound-producing/musical instruments, the an-
cient pilgrimage center at Chavin provides the
multifaceted material evidence needed for an ar-
chaeoacoustic case study.

Ancient Instruments Sound Again

What does it mean to excavate a musical instru-
ment from its resting place of three millennia?

Archaeologist John Rick and his teams had the
great fortune — and brilliant insight — to uncover a
cache of twenty decorated Strombus galeatus conch
shell ‘trumpets’ in 2001 at Chavin, a Peruvian na-
tional monument and UNESCO World Heritage
site that welcomes visitors. These intact pututus —
as musical horns of marine snail shell form are
called there now — were the first ceremonially as-
sociated sound-producing instruments to be ex-
cavated at Chavin, and the only ones known from
its extensive lithic art. 1

The stunning preservation of these pututus
meant that they could be handled carefully and
even played. Rick first called on his experience as

The Appendix Out Loud

The author, making acoustic measurements of the stone-and-mortar surface of "Building A"
in the ancient ceremonial complex at Chavin de Huantar, Peru.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

an avocational musician to document the readily
blown tones of the instruments, using the guitar
tuner he had on hand. Later, he sought the exper-
tise of sound specialists: Peruvian musicologists
and musicians, as well as California acoustician
David Lubman, brought their present-day per-
spectives to assess the overall sonic potential of
the shell horns. One ofRick’s then-undergraduate
advisees, Parker VanValkenburgh, took on a mor-
phological and iconographical study of the instru-
ments as his honors thesis project, an ambitious

Peruvian master musician and instrument builder Tito La Rosa per-
forms with one of the Chavin pututus to demonstrate the musical
potential of the ancient shell horns during a research session at the
Museo Nacional Chavin in 2008.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

and productive study that illuminated plausible
regional interconnections. Using a range of ap-
proaches, Rick’s team began working to docu-
ment the pututus and understand their relation-
ship with Chavin.

Implications of the Chavin Strombus horn discov-
ery traverse the historical timeline. We can date
these pututus with excavation stratigraphy in
terms of deposition era, and their markings from
hand and lip wear indicate long-term use. What
they represent in terms of site knowledge is im-
portant: instruments excavated from ceremonial
architecture — and prominently depicted in its
graphic record — can be contextually associated
with site ritual. These ancient shell horns are in-
tact and playable, so they might be performed well
into the future. This is especially important from
a methodological point-of-view, because develop-
ing technologies can reveal new forms of evidence
as tools change, a possibility Rick is constantly
considering . 2

Given Rick’s investigatory savvy, it’s no surprise
that a few years after unearthing the Chavin pu-
tutus, he found a way to make them sound again,
this time for the purpose of exploring and docu-
menting their range of acoustic potential. Enter
researchers from Stanford University’s Center for

July 2013

Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
(CCRMA), including then-Princeton comput-
er science/music professor and shell instru-
ment player Perry Cook. Our starting point
was the pututus, but project organizer and
CCRMA founder John Chowning also sought
to incorporate his colleagues’ expertise in
spatial acoustics and computational acoustic
modeling, areas dear to faculty math-and-en-
gineering wizards, Jonathan Abel and Julius
Smith.

Chavin iconography depicts marine shell objects and instruments, such
as the pututu held by the first figure in this cornice fragment discovered
on site by John Rick and teams.

Jose Luis Cruzado and Miriam Kolar

Stanford consulting professor Dr. Jonathan S. Abel led the archaeo-
acoustics team's development of the “bouquet" microphone array proto-
type and calibration system used to document Chavin gallery acoustics.

Miriam Kolar

Since our 2007 formation, my team has fo-
cused on testable scientific aspects of Chavin’s
sonic story. Back at Stanford, we developed
plans for on-site research that would pioneer
tools and methods to explore, archive, and
digitally preserve site and instrument acous-
tics. Rick continually offered information
and insights about the setting, but, as we
sound specialists learned during our first visit
to Chavin, without first-hand site experience
it had been impossible to adequately under-
stand the demands of the place and the impli-
cations of its archaeology. We refocused, and
I began my multi-year Andean immersion in
archaeoacoustics fieldwork. What were the
practical challenges of Chavin as a research
venue where we would apply custom tech
in fieldwork? How would acoustics findings
meld with anthropological considerations to
bolster the archaeological story?

Jo's

Chavin Archaeoacoustics:

An Exemplary Case Study

In the 1970’s, Peruvian archaeologist Luis
Lumbreras and teams discovered a terraced
canal running beneath Chavin’s Circular Pla-
za staircase that created a tremendous sound
effect when water was poured through. This
was the first documented archaeological con-
sideration of sound at Chavin, almost thirty
years before the pututu cache was uncovered.
Conservation limits such physical testing, so
questions of the site’s ancient sound environ-
ment were put to rest for decades with the
1976 publication of an article that estimated
hydraulic sound effects related to the monu-
ment’s extensive subterranean canal system
and interior architecture. Now, armed with
non-invasive research tools, my team’s on-site
archaeoacoustics fieldwork has introduced
new technologies to probe the elemental and
potentially subversive sonic environment of
this proposed oracular center.

The Appendix Out Loud

Chavin's monumental architecture has been partially covered and destroyed by landslides and human activity since its
development period estimated between 1200 and 500 B.C. Its stone-and-mortar architecture includes tall buildings,
multi-level terraces, and sunken plazas spanning kilometers, as well as subterranean canals that interlace the site and
connect its two surrounding rivers.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

An enigmatic stone monument located in the
north-central sierra of present-day Peru, the ex-
pansive complex at Chavin is known as a cere-
monial center, a “temple”, an “oracle site”, or a
spiritual locus. Archaeological investigations in
this narrow Andean plain — the site of multiple
landslides and the convergence of two powerful
rivers at 3180 meters above sea level — have un-
earthed extensive findings. A diverted river, kilo-
meters of subterranean canals, vista-occluding
ceremonial buildings, and associated domestic
and workshop areas all offer evidence of transfor-
mative landscape modification performed by an-
cient humans. Monumental construction seems
to have been continuous for nearly a millennium,
recently dated by Silvia Kembel and Herbert Haas
from around 1200 to 500 B.C.

As Daniel Contreras has eloquently argued, the
complex at Chavin demonstrates human domina-
tion and ongoing management of a risky natural
environment, a political accomplishment that
seems particularly well-aligned with the site’s re-

nown as a cult center pivotal to, or emblematic
of, the growing social hierarchical differentiation
that took place during the Andean Formative Pe-
riod. Social stratification has been identified in
evidence from the monument’s surrounding res-
idential and production areas through the work of
researchers such as Matthew Sayre and Christian
Mesia.

Theories to explain and characterize religious ac-
tivity at Chavin range from speculation to solid
anthropology; among the most recent and wide-
ly accepted are Richard Burger’s arguments for a
“Chavin Horizon” of dispersed Andean influence
around the site and its cult, Luis Lumbreras’ ma-
terial and economic interpretations of widespread
power structures centered at the monument, and
Rick’s detailed arguments for “an evolved Sha-
manism” in the context of “a tradition-based con-
vincing system” built at Chavin.

Evidential bases for these views highlight senso-
ry and experiential clues. Myriad stone and bone

July 2013

tools for the preparation and consumption of psy-
choactive plants have been excavated from the site
and its surroundings. Larger-than-life human,
animal, and anthro-zoomorphic sculptural stone
heads once lined exterior building walls, project-
ing the extreme grimaces, upturned eyes, and na-
sal mucus trails typical of such plant use. Labyrin-
thine, deeply enclosed interior spaces where light
could be excluded or manipulated using polished
coal mirrors and shadow projections interlace site
buildings. Chavin has been described by many as a
theatrical ritual venue: its varied architectural fea-
tures present contexts for one-to-many address,
sound projection, and group gathering areas, as
well as intimate spaces that could isolate indi-
viduals and perhaps facilitate psychotropic expe-
riences. Sensation took focus at ancient Chavin,
and though there are many senses to consider, the
sonic dimension is particularly provocative due
to its subversive immediacy: it creates effects that
are experienced, but not necessarily identified . 3

Archaeoacoustics methodology gives us a way to
identify such environmental sonic components
that contribute to the feeling of place and its com-
municative possibilities. Beyond first-hand sonic
tests — like performing a replica pututu in a Chavin
plaza — and the identification of apparent sound
effects — such as echoes among building faces and
surrounding hillsides — equipment-based acous-
tic measurements of Chavin’s well-preserved inte-
rior spaces can map how sound is transmitted and
transformed by the architecture. Understanding
how sound morphs as it propagates through space
is essential to documenting and estimating the
basic features of an ancient sonic environment.
The use of gear can change results, and the re-
searcher determines test parameters. Such acous-
tic measurements can be used to preserve the
sonic contours of spaces, yet these encoded data
don’t tell us their contexts; they merely give sum-
maries of places at moments. There’s embedded
research perspective that needs to be document-
ed, and many angles of access to the embodied
clues of past experience.

In my archaeoacoustics work, I wield manual
instruments such as measuring tapes and laser
distance finders, and computational tools such
as MATLAB in order to implement mathematical
audio digital signal processing (DSP) code. There

A figure holding an object resembling the so-called "San Pedro"
cactus, a psychoactive plant that grows in the region, is carved in
relief on one of the facing-stones that line Chavin's Circular Plaza.

Jose Luis Cruzado and Miriam Kolar

Making acoustic measurements in the Lanzon Gallery: the CCRMA
prototype "bouquet" array of Countryman B6 microphones used
to record acoustic test signals played from a Meyer MM-4XP loud-
speaker in order to evaluate interior architectural acoustics.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

The Appendix Out Loud

Acoustic measurements of the Chavin site employ diverse techniques and equipment. Left: Miriam Kolar wears in-ear
microphones to make recordings that enable researchers to evaluate how spatially imprinted sound is received by a human
listener; center: the fragmented exterior architecture of Chavin buildings hides well-preserved interiors as shown right: a
directional loudspeaker and subwoofer allow consistent reproduction of the mathematically generated audio signals used
to measure the acoustics of Laberintos Gallery.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

is no typical day of field work for me at Chavin:
one morning, I might crawl through slate-lined
canals built three thousand years ago, listening to
the silence and the closeness of my breath, look-
ing for places where sound can enter and exit. The
next afternoon, I could climb a scree-covered hill-
side to hear a mix of brass funeral bands, Huay-
no radio, traffic and construction noise drifting
up from the Andean town below, to assess lon-
ger-distance sound transmission. Some days I
bang my brain against numbers on my computer,
tweaking formulae to generate audio test signals,
strategic sounds to be played through loudspeak-
ers with the ambient responses digitally recorded
via microphones positioned to capture selected
spatial dynamics. Other days I hang out on the
phone discussing analytical challenges with men-
tors and colleagues back at Stanford.

Measured acoustic properties of site spaces — and
estimated acoustics from evidence-based mod-
els — can then be evaluated to understand human
perceptual implications. The same principles ap-
ply to studying musical instruments or objects that
produce sound, but on a smaller physical scale. If
both spatial acoustics and instrumental sonics are
understood, a comparative analysis can be made
to estimate the effects of their interaction — how a
space enhances or changes the sound of an instru-
ment — and these characteristics can be further
evaluated in terms of known human perceptual
correlates. It’s a chain of relational data that de-
pends on good documentation, math, and careful
reconstruction techniques to pull together find-
ings across disciplines.

Larger-than-life "cabezas
clavas" or tenon heads
once loomed above Chavin,
pegged into the exterior walls
of its ceremonial buildings.
The human, animal, and
hybrid forms may depict ritual
or mythological transforma-
tions, with features such as
upturned eyes, nasal mucus,
and extreme grimaces hinting
at psychotropic plant use.

Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

July 2013

To get at the sensory implications of mate-
rial traces, we look to psychology. Although
the transformative effects of perception may
vary individually, extensive systematic exper-
imentation has led to functional understand-
ings of human perception. Knowledge about
psychophysics — the interplay of stimuli and
sensation — can guide the archaeological
appraisal of how sound might have affected
people in an ancient context. If characteris-
tics of an ancient spatial sound environment
can be estimated from extant architecture,
landforms, or other spatial evidence at an
archaeological site, auditory implications for
ancient occupants can be evaluated.

Take, for example, the so-called “precedence
effect”, a well-understood auditory percep-
tual phenomenon. Real-world environments
contain surfaces and objects that divert, ab-
sorb, and reflect sound, creating multiple
paths for sound to transmit between its gen-
erating source and a listener who are separat-
ed by space. Based on hearing alone, a person
tends to perceive the direction of the source
location with the earliest arrival of sound
energy — the shortest sound propagation

path — even when there are many sequential
sound reflections (that can be “louder”) from
other directions. Architectural acoustic mea-
surements and computer models can be used
to estimate how the precedence effect might
be induced in ancient sonic contexts.

Acoustic and perceptual sciences can be ap-
plied together to better understand the senso-
ry potential of an ancient sound environment.
Where on-site perceptual experimentation
with human participants is possible, consen-
sus testing across a group of people can con-
firm estimated experiential components. Psy-
choacoustic laboratory experiments may also
be designed to evaluate the human auditory
implications of site acoustics. Combine this
knowledge with other information about the
archaeological context, and compelling clues
about ancient human experience emerge.
Experiential possibility is rooted in material
fragments. Hard evidence — Chavin’s carved
shell and mortared stone — is a weighty but
enigmatic guide to the past.

Dr. Perry R. Cook performed the Chavin pututus during acoustic measurements of the instruments made at the Museo Na-
cional Chavin in 2008. Left: Countryman E6 microphones were positioned inside the Strombus shell horns to record acous-
tic transmission from the mouthpiece to bell; center: Chavin project director, archaeologist Dr. John Rick and Cook position
microphones; right: Cook plays the pututus for measurement, using a systematic sequence of performance techniques.

Jyri Huopaniemi and Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel

The Appendix Out Loud

Acoustic Alignment of Instruments and
Architecture

My team’s comprehensive acoustic workup of 19
of the 20 Chavin pututus gives us details of their
functional characteristics that can be used to es-
timate their interactive potential with site archi-
tecture. The so-called “sounding tones” of these
instruments — the readily played frequencies that
a musician might call “pitches” — measure be-
tween 272 Hz to 340 Hz (approximately “middle”
C#4 to F4 on a standardly tuned piano). In one of
the most compelling instrumental and architec-
tural correspondences that we’ve documented to
date, these specific sonic frequencies are ampli-
fied by 10-20 dB (10 dB is like turning up the vol-
ume on your music player to make it seem twice
as loud) above all other sound by three architec-
tural ducts in a key Chavin ceremonial location.
These horizontal ducts connect the interior gal-
lery of the “Lanzon”, the 4.5 meter-tall engraved
granite monolith, with the exterior Circular Plaza.
In its physical alignment, the central duct pro-
vides a direct line-of-sight — and, as supported by
acoustic measurements, a plausibly symbolic and
functional “line-of-speech” — between the carved
mouth of the imposing fanged figure and the out-
side world of the plaza.

The architectural acoustic link between the
Lanzon Gallery ducts and the site-excavated
sound-producing instruments is a rare gem of
archaeological correspondence that’s difficult to
dismiss as coincidence. First, Chavin’s architec-
ture is thoroughly channeled with ducts of differ-
ent shapes and sizes. Therefore, unique structures
of a particular size and placement among these
ubiquitous forms suggest planned construction:
design.

Second, the location of these tuned sound con-
duits — between the consequential stone mono-
lith and the exclusive plaza setting — would be
ritually significant, and it’s riddled with other
links to shell horns. In this apparent ceremonial
locus, pututus are depicted, as if performed by
figures in procession, on stone reliefs lining the
north-western wall of the Circular Plaza, just a few
meters away from where the Strombus-projecting
ducts open onto overhead walls. The plaza floor
was crafted with two inlays of fossilized sea snails

Sparse reconstruction of Chavin's Circular Plaza and Lanzon
Gallery architecture shows the "line-of-speech" between the inte-
rior Lanzon monolith and the exterior plaza, through the central
duct that acoustically emphasizes tones of the site-excavated shell
instruments.

Reconstruction by Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel, from data by Silvia
Kembel, John Rick, and new on-site measurements

Facing-stones that line Chavin's Circular Plaza depict figures hold-
ing pututus, as if performing them in procession.

Jose Luis Cruzado and Miriam Kolar

July 2013

on its paving stones, spiraled animals that appear
like cross-sectioned pututus. A few meters south,
a plausible pututu storage location exists: in the
Caracolas Gallery where Rick’s team unearthed
these instruments, they were deposited as if they
had been hung along its walls. This constellation
of factors provides strong support for the idea of
ancient ceremony enlivened by the sound of these
horns. Converging forms of evidence connect pu-
tutus to the Circular Plaza, and dynamically con-
nect the plaza with the hidden Lanzon monolith.
The building specifically projects the sound of the
site-excavated instruments — and excludes other
sounds — from the mouth of its “oracle” to listen-
ers outside.

Echoes of Ancient Experience

Sound — because it’s experiential — is an ephemer-
al artifact of spaces and objects that we can use to
better understand past life. Some archaeoacoustic
research is persuasively manifest for present-day
observers: hearing a sequence of replica pututu
echoes circling around Chavin’s valley can’t trans-
mit cultural meanings from the past, but through
this experience, one better appreciates the dy-
namics of setting that would have influenced an-
cient human activity. Performing a replica shell
horn inside Chavin’s galleries, I can feel through
my body the resonances between instrument and
architecture, a physically and emotionally trans-
formative experience that would have been simi-
larly sensed — but interpreted differently — by hu-
mans in the past.

Scientific research techniques based on material
evidence of the distant past give detail about the
less apparent aspects of sound that are funda-
mental to human experience. Such findings per-
mit reconstructions that can further illuminate
elemental characteristics of ancient sound envi-
ronments. Using a computational acoustic mod-
eling tool based on measured acoustic data and
auditory perceptual experiment findings, we can
test and auralize the acoustic effects of space by
virtually reconstructing site areas that are no lon-
ger intact. Measured and modeled sound trans-
mission dynamics across site spaces suggest how
people could have used sound to communicate

or influence the perspective of others in ancient
Chavin. And acoustic measurements have demon-
strated that Chavin’s site-excavated pututus are
dynamically linked to its imposing Lanzon mono-
lith: instruments and architecture together make
a sounding “oracle” mechanism that could project
secrets from the restricted depths of the site to its
public, dominating exterior.

Archaeoacoustics at Chavin continues, as we en-
gage these and other research approaches to bet-
ter understand the social implications of sound
environments for people in the ancient Andes.
Echoes of ancient experience tell us more about
our human roots in another time and place, offer-
ing fragments of a non-verbal history.

Notes

1. Prior to this discovery, a few ancient shell horns
were known in the region — from related sites and /
or bearing associated iconography — but no defin-
itively sound-producing objects had been docu-
mented in on-site archeological findings from the
Chavin period.

2. Because these shell horns show substantial use-
wear, and have been crafted from their nascent
animal state into functional instruments, their
intended general purpose and actual use as sound
producers seems incontestable. The fortuitous
combination of the pututus’ condition, situation,
and quantity allows for comparative and compre-
hensive analyses of these object-instruments.

3. Light manipulation via gallery ducts has been
discussed in J. W. Rick, “Context, Construction,
and Ritual in the Development of Authority at
Chavin de Huantar” in W. J. Conklin, & J. Quilter,
Eds., Chairin Art, Architecture and Culture [Monograph
61] (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology,
University of California, 2008), pp. 3-34. New doc-
umentation of shadow dynamics was initiated by
the author with Jose Cruzado in 2010.

For a complete record of supporting citations for
this article, view the web version available from
http://theappendix.net/issues/20i3/7
after July 22, 2013.

The Appendix Out Loud

Deadly Notes:

Atlantic Soundscapes and the Writing of the

Middle Passage

Danielle Skeehan

[SJince speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provoc-
ative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what
seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a
wild animal. This is how dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving
it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.

— Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse Selected Essays

July 2013

‘A Kind of Chorus

In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, the captain
and crew of the Massachusetts-bound Bache-
lor’s Delight anchor their ship in the harbor of
a small, uninhabited island off the coast of
Chile. They soon find that they are not alone.
When a rather battered and weather-beaten
Spanish merchant ship sails into harbor, the
American captain, Amasa Delano, decides to
approach the vessel and offer his services.*

Boarding the San Dominick, Delano is immedi-
ately struck by the “the wailing ejaculations of
the indiscriminate multitude” and the “noisy
confusion” resonating throughout the Span-
ish ship: oakum pickers “accompanied the[ir]
task with a continuous, low, monotonous
chant, droning and drilling away like so many
gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral
march.” Hatchet sharpeners “clashed their
hatchets together, like cymbals, with a barba-
rous din.” Growing “impatient of the hubbub
of voices,” Delano turns to the captain of the
ship, Benito Cereno, and asks him to account
for the discord. As Cereno tells how sickness
and maritime misadventure depleted the
crew and battered the ship, the “cymballing
of the hatchet-polishers” continues to punc-
tuate the narrative, and Delano wonders why
“why such an interruption should be allowed,
especially in that part of the ship, and in the
ears of an invalid.”

*Melville's novella is a fictionalized retelling of events that happened off the coast of
Santa Maria, a small, uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, on February 20, 1 805.
The American sea captain, Amasa Delano, had anchored The Perseverance there while
they were restocking water supplies on their return journey from Canton. While there, a
rather battered and weather beaten Spanish merchant ship soon sailed into harbor and
appeared to be in distress. Assessing the situation, Delano decided to approach The
Tryal and offer his services. In Delano's published account of what followed, he notes,
"As soon as I got on deck, the captain, mate, people and slaves, crowded around me
to relate their stories, and to make known their grievances" (p. 322). Delano was on
board The Tryal for the greater part of the day, and relates very little else until— at his
departure — the Captain of the ship— Benito Cereno— jumps overboard and informs
Delano that he had been audience to an elaborate performance carried off by the en-
slaved Africans on board the ship, that they had revolted, and that Cereno himself was,
in fact, their captive. The events are related in three prior written accounts (as well as
numerous North American newspapers): the ship's log recounting that day's events, the
Lima court records, and Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres (Boston 1817). Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (first published
in 1 855 in Putnam's Monthly) takes up the challenge of imagining and recreating the
holes in Delano's narrative and invites us to consider why such an elaborate drama was
excluded from the record in the first place.

Observing the apparent lack of order on
board the San Dominick with his “blunt-think-
ing American eyes,” Captain Delano perhaps
serves as a cautionary tale for “bad readers.”
By refusing to recognize the “noisy confusion”
as a mode of communication, Delano fails to
read — or, more accurately, to hear — what has
actually happened on the ship: the enslaved
men and women had risen up against their
former captors, had taken control of the ship,
and were attempting to sail to Senegal. The
apparent disorder was, in fact, not disorder
at all: rather it was a highly orchestrated “op-
eratic” performance that staged the relation-
ship between free and enslaved — European
and New World African — precisely as Delano
expected to see it.

I begin with Melville’s novella because it may
also caution scholars who study the archives
of Atlantic slavery. Inevitably, we too, like
Captain Delano, view the contents of ship’s
logs, captain’s journals, and account books
with “a stranger’s eyes.” The cold empiricism
of these records encourages us to read at a
surface level and glean only the facts that re-
cord keepers intended to be found.

Yet ships traveling the pathways of the Mid-
dle Passage — and beyond — were anything
but silent spaces. In the words of a sailor on
board the Liverpool slave trader, the Hubri-
d as, in 1786, enslaved men and women raised
their voices in “a kind of chorus”
that resounded “at the close of
particular sentences.” The sailor’s
use of the term “chorus” is worth
noting. A chorus consists of indi-
vidual voices coming together to
produce a collective, synchronized
voice, and in theatrical traditions
the chorus served as commentary
on dramatic action. These call and
response soundings allowed men
and women speaking different
languages to communicate about
the conditions of their captivity. In

The Appendix Out Loud

fact, on board the Hubridas, what began as mur-
murs and morphed into song erupted before long
into the shouts and cries of coordinated revolt. In
the words of another sailor, “what [was] the sub-
ject of their songs [I] cannot say.”

However, as readers of these archives, we can be-
gin to imagine. It is no easy task to reconstruct
these Atlantic soundscapes: sound fades, only
writing remains. At the surface, the slave trade’s
systematic documentation — in the form of ship’s
logs, insurance documents, sales records, ac-
count books, and published journals — appears
to record the erasure and suppression of African
voices, cultures, and resistance. But, like Captain
Delano, I wonder if there may be something in
these records that we have failed to hear. By under-
standing the writing of the Middle Passage as an
early audio technology — rather than simply a his-
tory of exploitation — we can think about sound as
a new language of resistance perhaps particular
to pathways of the Middle Passage and embedded
in the writing itself. In these accounts the dead-
ly notes of an enslaved cargo communicating and
acting in mass regularly interrupt the deadly marks
of the official record. Maritime writing thus re-
cords the conditions of the Middle Passage from
two perspectives: the calculated master narrative
at the surface of the record, and the sounds that
erupt from the depths.*

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The account Book of the Brig Sally with a 1 7 65 page from
its inventories listing slaves.

Digitized by the Brown University Steering Committee
on Slavery and Justice

*See for instance, the work of Stephanie Smallwood and Ian Bau-
com. In Saltwater Slavery, Smallwood examines how ships' logs,
captains' journals, sales records and a litany of texts connected
to the trade develop a discourse about race and slavery. See
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from
Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007). In Specters of the Atlantic, Baucom, in turn, argues
that African captives were interpolated not only into a British slave
trade, but into the systems of credit that they in turn helped to
support. Examining the trials that resulted when the captain of the
Zong murdered 1 3 1 of the Africans on board his ship, Baucom
argues for how insurance documents transformed captive bodies
into capital or credit. See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic:
Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of H i story (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005).

By a curious coincidence, as each point was
recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would
strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous
comment on the white stranger’s thoughts.

— Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

fAt best we refer to the nascent voices of people like Venture
Smith, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and others who have
survived the passage and lived to tell about it. Notable examples
include the memoirs or accounts of men and women such as
Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Venture
Smith, Belinda Royall, and Mary Prince.

Because few firsthand narratives of the Middle
Passage written or dictated by New World Afri-
cans survive, the experiences of men and women
traversing the Atlantic has been understood as
largely unrepresentable. For these reasons we in-
evitably turn to the records of their captors, and
this record seems to only confirm the unrepre-
sentable nature of enslaved voices and experienc-
es: the sounds produced by captives are recorded

as mere noise — as ‘murmurs,’ ‘cries,’ ‘complaints,’
‘shrieks,’ ‘groans,’ ‘bursts,’ ‘uproars.’*

By favoring the written word, we also thereby
privilege forms of knowledge deriving from sight
rather than sound. Sight has long been associated
with ‘reason’ and modernity, in turn, as triggered
by and indebted to the rise of ocular thinking. And
as we ‘examine,’ ‘look to,’ ‘investigate,’ and ‘seek’

July 2013

*1 am borrowing this language from Michelle Cliff, who writes:
"To write a complete Caribbean woman, or man for that
matter, demands of us retracing the African past of ourselves,
reclaiming as our own, and as our subject, a history sunk
under the sea, or scattered as potash in the cane fields, or
gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its
rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratification. Or a
past bleached from our minds. It means finding the art forms
of those of our ancestors and speaking in the patois forbidden
us. It means realizing our knowledge will always be wanting.

It means also, I think, mixing in the forms taught us by the
oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style,
and turning it to our purpose." Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look
Behind and Claiming (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985), p. 14.

|R. Murray Schafer defines the concept of "soundscapes" as
sonic environments that provide an opening for scholars to
consider "the enculturated nature of sound. ..and the material
spaces of performance that are constructed for the purpose of
propagating sound." See The Soundscape: Our Sonic Envi-
ronment and the Tuning of the World (Merrimac, MA: Destiny,

1 993], See also Mark M. Smith's essay "Listening to the Heard
Worlds of Antebellum America," Journal of The Historical Soci-
ety (June 2000): 63-97. Smith invites early American scholars,
in particular, to think about how sound can serve as an "index
of identity." Similarly, Richard Rath's 2003 book-length study,
How Early America Sounded (Cornell: Cornell University Press,
2005), attends to sound as a way to "open up parts of these
worlds, not to get a glimpse of them but to listen in." Most
recently, American Quarterly published a special issue on
sound studies in September 201 1 and just this past February
Commonplace released an issue on music and Early America.

One of the earliest images of the gourd banjo, an instrument of
the Middle Passage and African diaspora, depicted in Sir Hans
Sloane's Voyage (1707).

Wikimedia Commons

the remnants of histories sunk in the sea, the very
language we use to disclose, discover, and detect
the meanings of texts points to a methodology
that is, in many ways, still rooted in Enlighten-
ment-era empiricism and traditions of favoring
sight as the most critical of the five senses.*

The rise of “sound studies” has challenged the pri-
macy of text and has invited us to think about —
or listen for — how sound has shaped the history
of human experience. By focusing on the sounds
we can glean from written records, we can begin
to listen to the static — or silence — and for other
messages embedded in the texts. And it is here
that the cold accounts of the slave trade itself be-
come the background static — the non-sense —
that frames the primary action staged on slave
ships: that is, enslaved people’s acts of communi-
cation and production of sounds. 1

The soundscape of the Middle Passage relied on
the human voice, the body, and the ship — rather
than traditional instruments — to make sound.
Notably, these sounds are produced by people
using the material conditions of their imprison-
ment — instruments of labor, chains, and the ship
itself. The captain of the Sandoum, for instance,
records feet stomping on boards, hands slapping
on thighs and, what seemed to him “unintelligible
cries.” Dr. Thomas Trotter, a surgeon on board the
Brookes recreates the stifled voices crying out from
below deck, “Yarra! Yarra!” [We are sick] and “Kic-
keraboo! Kickeraboo!” [we are dying] . And Joseph
Hawkins dramatizes voices and bodies staged for
revolt as enslaved men and women in the hold “set
up a scream,” “shouting whenever those above did
any thing that appeared likely” to overturn the or-
der of the ship.

By using their own bodies to make sound, en-
slaved Africans could contest the logic of their
enslavement, challenging the very notion that
these bodies are no longer their own. The acous-
tic architecture of ships was essential to creating
this sound. In Olaudah Equiano’s account of the
Middle Passage he describes the ship as a “hollow
place.” As Equiano’s language suggests, the grave-
like architectural design of the ship and its daily
workings were intended to strip men and women
of ties to culture, language, and homeland, and
to alienate them from each other; however, these

The Appendix Out Loud

very conditions may have led to the formation of
new communities and new cultures.

The very hollowness of the ship, structured by
wood, cloth, and copper, meant it was also a space
that was, if unintentionally, designed to resonate
and carry sound: wooden ships were gigantic,
migrating percussionist instruments that carried
voices, rhythms, and sounds beyond ship holds
and deck barricades. Moreover, if sailors and
captains used the spatial design and knowledge
of ship mechanics to assert Anglophone author-
ity, enslaved men and women may have used the
ship as percussionist instrument and amplifier of
sound to contest that authority.

While the nature and goal of commercial mari-
time writing means these sounds are rare in the
records, they are a significant characteristic of
enslaved peoples’ accounts of the Middle Passage.
For instance, in Ottobah Cugoano’s 1787 narra-
tive, he recounts “when a vessel arrived to conduct
us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene;
there was nothing to be heard but the rattling of
chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and
cries of our fellow-men.” The “horrible scene” in
Cugoano’s account quickly shifts registers to the
sounds of the ship, and thus from the visual to the
auditory: chains rattling, whips lashing. Cugoano
repeatedly acknowledges that these experiences
are beyond what “language can describe,” and
his passage into slavery also suggests a passage
into an Atlantic soundscape defined by the voices
of the enslaved — rather than the written record of
captors.'

As Paul Gilroy suggests, the “unsayability” of
racial terror “can be used to challenge the privi-
leged conception of both language and writing
as preeminent expressions of human conscious-
ness.” Language and writing have only a “limit-
ed expressive power” to communicate the poly-
phonic — or multi-sounded — experiences of the
Middle Passage. Sound, in the words of Saidiya
Hartman, could be said to “topple the hierarchy of
discourse, and ... engulf authorized speech in the
clash of voices” — or, as in Benito Cereno, the clash
of hatchets. That is, the sound produced by New
World Africans may represent a counterclaim to
political enfranchisement and may provide an-
other model of political process. The combined

Representations w insureec tion

on board

a Slave. - Sinr.

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BARRICADO, mW on 'f’oa-rd a // 1 S/ave . a.* <1 tvAenever

St* t/ie pn\y to totals report part 1 . Art S LAVES .
Minutes of' nidnur before the Hons* of' t'ommons.
Wadi fronts £fsay on t'olonuahon \ . 4 jt .

"Representation of an Insurrection on board a Slave-Ship," from
Carl B. Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization (1794).

Slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael
Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
and the University of Virginia Library.

record of noise and revolt suggests that cargoes
of captive men and women speaking a number of
different languages and dialects who began their
journey to ships coasting off the shores ofWestern
Africa from vastly different regions and cultures
began to communicate with each other and to act
en masse. 2

In the words of another author, the poet James
Field Stanfield, “fearful sounds,” “deadly notes,”
and “trembling rage” reverberate through the
bodies of slaving ships. He continues, “In one
long groan the feeble throng unite; One strain of
anguish wastes the lengthen’d night.” Out of dis-
cordant voices, he suggests, emerge sounds that

July 2013

combine in a polyphonic chorus to contest
the abstraction and inhumanity of the slave
trade. These sonic registers transform radical
unbelonging into, potentially, a form of rad-
ical resistance — radical, perhaps, precisely
because it cannot be reproduced by the re-
cord. 3

Now with scales dropped from his eyes,
[Captain Delano] saw the negroes, not in
misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically
concerned for Don Benito, but with mask
torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives,
in ferocious piratical revolt.

— Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

New ways of reading the archive of Atlan-
tic slavery are particularly significant at this
moment. Since 2002, eight major cities —
Berkeley, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Milwaukee, Oakland, Philadelphia, and San
Francisco — and three states — California,
Iowa, and Illinois — have passed slavery dis-
closure laws. Disclosure laws belong to a his-
tory of movements to secure reparations for
slavery: they require companies to research
and then disclose any ties that these compa-
nies or their predecessors had to slavery. The
focus on disclosure — on opening up that which
was closed or shut, on unclosing, unfolding,
and unfastening contemporary economic
and historical ties to the slave trade — points
to a history that will not be silenced.

Yet the question remains: whose stories do
these archives tell? How can one represent
the (largely) unvoiced experiences of men
and women on ships traversing the Middle
Passage? And can this be a story of their voic-
es and resistance, or merely a repetition of
historical violence by re-examining the cold
accounting of the written record? Maritime
writing may be produced by Europeans, but it
also reminds us that enslaved peoples formed
a significant part of an emergent soundscape

of modernity. Technologies of seeing and
looking serve as imperial engines that per-
haps only sound can contest.

In accounts that record the sounds of insur-
rection along the routes of colonial slavery,
we can see — and listen for — histories sunk in
the sea.

Notes

1. Ottobah Cugoano, Narrative of the Enslavement
of Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa; published
by himself, in the Year 1787 (1787), 124-5. AH
references to this text refer to the electron-
ic version available through the University
of North Carolina’s Documenting the American
South digital archive (http://docsouth.unc.
edu/neh/cugoano/menu.html) .

2. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.”
Small Axe, 12 no. 2 (June 2008): 12. Gilroy pos-
its “antiphony” as such a model of political
action. Antiphony literally means “opposite
voice” and suggests an emphasis on a dialec-
tical production of meaning located in the
auditory realm.

3. All quotes refer to the edition available
through Archive.org.

The Appendix Out Loud

“Come hear this ditty”:

Seventeenth- Century Drinking Songs
and the Challenges of Hearing the Past

Mark Hailwood

n April, 1612, the constables of Caine,
Wiltshire, made a desperate plea to
their superiors — the county magis-
trates — to help them reverse a surge
in the number of alehouses in their town. Their
complaint was that the alehouses “doe all brewe
and vie who maye brewe the strongest Ale and
thither do resorte all the great drinkers bothe
of the Towne and Countrie to spende theyer
tyme in idleness and theyer monie in excessivie
drinkinge.” When the constables sought to dis-
courage such behavior by charging the men in-
volved with drunkenness, their efforts were un-
successful, for “all men for the most parte love
these cupp companions so well, that no man will
take uppon him to be a sworne witnes against any
drunkard.”

This has changed, and historians now see drink-
ing as an activity that is culturally meaningful.
Decisions about who to drink with, how to drink,
what to drink, how to pay, how much to drink,
how often to drink, and how to judge the drinking
behavior of others, are thought to provide an in-
sight into the underlying values of a society.

But how can we answer these questions for distant
people who drank in distant contexts, such as the
denizens of a village alehouse in seventeenth-cen-
tury England or the “cup companions” of Caine?
There is no archive expressly designed to capture
this sort of everyday cultural activity, so we are
extremely lucky to be able to access it through a
remarkable source: seventeenth-century drinking
songs.

*A survey of the historical blogosphere also
demonstrates the prominent place of drinking
in both early modern English and early Ameri-
can society.

The phrase "blot out the horror of their lives"
belongs to Keith Thomas, from his classic work
Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York:
Charles Schribner's Sons, 1971).

As this case shows, alcohol played a central role
in early modern life, occupying much of the time
of both law enforcement officers and guzzling
“cupp companions.” Historians
have long known this, but until re-
cently it was not considered to be
a particularly interesting feature of
these past societies. Even the most
astute pioneers of cultural history
saw it as an inevitable product of
life in unstable and harsh worlds,
in which people drank heavi-
ly to “blot out the horror of their
lives.” In this interpretation, drink
served as an anesthetic against an
oppressive and tedious existence.*

Anonymous, Peasants in the Tavern, Netherlands, oil on panel, 17th century (detail)

Wikimedia Commons

The broadside ballad was a particularly popular
form of printed product in the seventeenth-cen-
tury Anglo-American world. These were songs
printed on a single sheet of paper and sold cheap-
ly for a penny by sellers who recited them in the
streets and in alehouses. There were millions of
these sheets in circulation; the staple subjects
for the songs included courtship and marriage,
affairs of state, sensational murders, chivalric ad-
ventures, and moral guidance. Best of all from the
perspective of the historian of drinking cultures,
one particularly popular genre was the “Drinking
and Good Fellowship” ballad. These were drink-
ing songs designed to be recited in the alehouse,
and many alehouse-keepers pasted them up on
the walls to attract drinkers to their establish-
ment.

It is amazing that any of these broadside ballads
survive. They were cheap and ephemeral prod-
ucts, and often ended up being used as kindling or
toilet paper when they became worn and unread-
able, or when their songs fell out of favor. Thank-
fully, a handful of gentlemen collectors — most
notably Samuel Pepys — took an interest in these
manifestations of “low” culture that many of their
peers found vulgar, and carefully pasted their pur-
chases into bound volumes that have survived to
the present.

The drinking songs amongst these surviving bal-
lads are a unique form of evidence for answering
questions about the character and meanings of
seventeenth-century drinking culture. They often
contained warnings about the types of companion
to avoid, or extrapolated the qualities of the ideal
drinking companion:

Roome/br a lusty lively Lad,
dery dery downe,

That will shew himselfe blyth be he ne’re so sad,
dery dery dourne,

That cryes a fig for pouerty
And takes all troubles patiently,

Will spend what he gets,

And drinke more then he eates,

That neuer meanes to oary
From good fellowship free,

If thou such a one be.

lie drinke to thee kinde Harry.

Some contained drinking games within them,
with each verse including instructions for more
mugs to be fetched and drained, with drinkers/
singers getting through thirteen helpings of beer
by the end of the song!

Be merry my hearts, and call/or your quarts,
and let no liquor be lacking,

We haue gold in store, we purpose to roare,
untill we set care a packing.

Then Hostis make haste, and let no time waste,
let euery man haue his due,

To save shooes and trouble, bring in the pots double
for he that made one, made two.

Then Hostesse go fetch us some, /or till you do come
we are ofalljoyes bereaven,

You know what I meane, make haste come again,
for he that made ten, made eleuen.

Then Hostesse lets know, the summe that we owe,
twelve-pence there is /or certaine,

Then/ll totherpot, and heres money /ort
for he that made twelue, made thirteene.

Other songs attacked those who refused to engage
in bouts of alehouse jollity as covetous misers,
whose individualistic worldview posed a threat to
communal solidarity:

There’s many men get store of treasure
yet they liue like uery slaues:

In this world they haue no pleasure

the more they haue, the more they craue.

Hang suchgreedy-minded misers,
that will ne’r contented be.

These songs can be read and analyzed to recon-
struct the key features of seventeenth-century
English drinking culture and the broader societal
values and assumptions that underpinned it, and
doing precisely this has formed a large part of my
historical research.

There is a major problem here though: these songs
don’t really survive at all. I can sit at my desk and
read their words, but this is hardly giving me ac-
cess to how these words would have been expe-
rienced by early modern drinkers. I sit quietly,

The Appendix Out Loud

To the fame tune.

Good Ale for my money.

The Good-feilowcs refoiution o', ftrong Ale,

That cures his nofe from looking pale.

Tothc tunc of, The Counircy Laffe.

The fecond part.

H ’reljmcl oSi.totfice Itrtrfatc, towafcrn

“ ins foes Will an r.nmit.

uic .rrcticre m.-tll Input foj bccrc

. — .in go home, nor I w : H nofgo home, ' t

in long of rheoyle of bitty, &sS-!

I ftav aU night for my 'Wight.

and go ho. ,.e in the mom.ng early,

Iprres ftmjsrtt fatitb *N'<I etjeCoott,
ana I r ink t pc fin t felt-null tr, -
Ipetes struen uitib bis Mon Ijookc,

d cannot chafe bn; tone her :

©crpnc Unt il dll, Ui.il right joob teilt,
litres ale 83 b jo®ie 03 a bei re.

Elsil make an ole monunMnct fojfor.

J’o) carencertp.no a uo

'iSSsr- M

•tsHasHasss"* fcjjj

tec'll make it up

» titling*.

let .f other frohinc,im«29(

to uii'tlic linger becce:

3 trait none ofebrs company
teltbtbrrctecboffenMb.
Ebercfoicca'lfojvaur jugs a peed
anbbjinkcoliimcbaivctett-^ ^

A Health to all Good-Fellowes : llililSi^liliSSiMIl

O R,

The good Companions Aritlimaticke. The fecond part. To the fame tune.

To the tune of, To drive the cold Winter at>0.

o go mclloncloltp lofll bjbtgas to follp,

O ona Hull ointte pilnop.ilt magrat,

Bin (tliconrli 3 mill take, ft actor Hall mallr,

nl tills centre 3 tell tahc.tl nitet Ipall made, 3 cermet content rat, lo He tin pot nnptg,

-"* *? rp<nt ' I «"•?*«» m m elm “S cm ;« to tom

*si!«srs“- rjaaiBSs 1 -—

atbom.3tcnfcm.Wlbi

be gone,

London Printed for Henry Qojfen. V TN IS.

English Broadside Ballad Archive, Roxburghe
collection by permission of The British Library

July 2013

alone, peacefully reading and reflecting on a
ballad. They would have huddled around an
ale bench, shoulder-to-shoulder with drink-
ing companions, and bellowed out these
words — they would have heard these songs as
much as they read them.

Historians that have worked on broadside
ballads have not been deaf to this aspect of
their source material, and attempts have been
made to recover something of their sound.
Most of these songs specified the tune to
which they should be sung, and it has been
possible to reconstruct many of these melo-
dies. The creators of the English Broadside
Ballad Archive, a free online database of sur-
viving seventeenth-century ballads, have even
had a go at singing the ballads along to their
tunes and recorded the results. Take a mo-
ment to listen to their version of the drinking
ballad “A Messe of good Fellows.”

This is a fabulous resource, but I can’t help
feel that this still falls short of capturing the
way drinking songs were experienced by ale-
house-goers. It gives us a sense of how the
tunes were simple and catchy, designed as
much as a mnemonic device as an aesthetic
one. It may also assist imaginative efforts to
hear the lone-voice of a ballad singer in the
street — though even for this purpose it is per-

A MefTeofgood Eel lows:

OR, ~

TBeeenerous (park who roundly,
doth ctlMnd faycj for hisp.tr,

TulbjVre have and (hall haveabundancc,
come fill usthe other od quart.

To the tunc of, mrteJ tni tom.

haps too polished, as one seventeenth-cen-
tury writer complained that ballad sellers’
voices tended to be “as harsh a noise as ever
Cart-wheel made.” It certainly doesn’t cap-
ture the atmosphere we would expect to ac-
company an alehouse ballad performance,
for which we might imagine background
noise, rhythmic hand-clapping, and massed
voices for the chorus.*

We might also expect instrumental accompa-
niment. It was common for fiddlers to per-
form in alehouses, particularly on special oc-
casions. Drumming might be heard, as it was
in Glastonbury’s Ship Inn one night in 1657,
when a gentleman who had planned to lodge
with a friend there overnight had a change
of heart due to the presence of “a disorderly
company ranting and drinking and drum-
ming,” who “beat the drum all night [such]
that the neighbors were much disturbed and
could not sleep.” In another raucous drinking
bout in a 1609 Cheshire alehouse, one drinker
repeatedly blasted a trumpet to “call together
all the drunkards.”

The sound of a drinking song is likely then to
have been much more vibrant and boisterous
than the sound evoked by listening (alone at a
desk) to the recordings offered by the English
Broadside Ballad Archive, however innovative
a resource they are. There are other problems
here, of course, that even an attempt to create
a recording that more closely evoked an ale-
house atmosphere would not overcome. One
is that a ballad would not only have been sung
or listened to — it would have been a perfor-
mance to be seen as well. A wink or a nod to
accompany certain lines, or a sideways glance
or grin at a drinking companion, could have
transformed the meanings of the lines being
delivered, something which will forever be
lost to the historian.

*There are ballad recordings that come closer to this, and do
include background noise and an attempt to recreate a more
realistic performance environment. Unfortunately they are
not freely available, but see Christopher Marsh, Music and
Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010) which comes with an Audio CD of
recordings.

English Broadside Ballad Archive, Roxburghe collection by permission Listen to "A Messe of good Fellows" at
of The British Library http://appendic.es/m/z

34 The Appendix Out Loud

And then, of course, there is the issue of drunken-
ness. Even if we replace the practice of sitting qui-
etly at a desk reading a ballad with sitting at a desk
listening to a recording of a ballad and trying hard
to imagine drums, trumpets, and raucous merri-
ment, the average historian (one would expect) is
still going to be sober. The drinking song experi-
ence was not. A beer at lunchtime might help, but
the levels of intoxication that would accompany
the drinking song experience might again exert
considerable influence on a song’s meaning, as
humor and camaraderie become enhanced and
exaggerated.

In other words, simply hearing a recording of a
ballad drinking song may not take us very much
further towards recovering the way it was experi-
enced than reading it does. Again, ballad schol-
ars have not ignored this, and efforts have been
made at various ballad conferences to try to cre-
ate a performative atmosphere through collective
singing, sometimes with alcohol involved. I hav-
en’t yet had this experience myself — though I will
at a conference next spring — but I already have
one major reservation (other than being hopeless
at singing) about what this can achieve. A group
of academics closely analyzing every aspect of the
dynamics is hardly likely to create an authentic or
natural atmosphere: the whole thing is likely to be
too self-conscious.

How, then, can the historian intent on ‘hearing’
their source material get closer to doing so? I’m
not sure we can, but if the answer lies anywhere
then I’m fairly sure it cannot be found at my desk.
Arguably my greatest insight into the experience
of the seventeenth-century drinking song came
not from a recording, nor any sort of forced imag-
inative effort. It came when attending a recent En-
glish football match. Standing shoulder-to-shoul-
der with fellow supporters of Bristol City, I heard
the slow, repetitive beat of a drum, and a lone
voice projecting the words to a familiar exhorta-
tion of our team’s quality.

Gradually, those around me took up the song — a
few knew all the lines, most could bellow out the
chorus — and we worked our way through a bois-
terous rendition, complete with well-worn jokey
asides, reaching a crescendo that delivered with it
a swelling sense of collective solidarity and cama-

raderie. It was, admittedly, an almost exclusively
masculine experience, but this too had echoes
of many an alehouse drinking bout of the seven-
teenth century.

And crucially, of course, we were all drunk. I’d ex-
perienced this many times before, but not before
had I made the connections between those imag-
inative efforts at my desk and these cold Saturday
afternoon experiences away from it.

I could be wrong: the experience of a twen-
ty-first-century English football song and the
experience of a seventeenth-century English
drinking song might be some distance apart. Yet
it seemed there were greater parallels between
these two experiences than there were between
some of my more detached academic attempts to
‘hear’ the songs of the past and how those songs
were actually experienced. I’m generally wary of
letting personal experience stand in for historical
knowledge based on a reading of source material,
but when we try to recover aspects of the past that
no amount of reading can achieve, we have to open
our minds to approaches that transcend the more
conventionally academic.

Listening to the past is a step in the right direc-
tion, but when this too is done in a detached and
reflective way in the comfort of an office, seminar
room, or conference gathering, we are still miss-
ing something — something that we may need to
move further away from our desks to get close to.

All together now...

(To the tune of “Land ofHope and Glory”)

“We all follow the City,

Over Land and Sea,

We all/ollow the City,

On to Victory”

July 2013

Psalms and Silence:

The Soundtrack of John Williams’s Captivity

Glenda Goodman

Ip 1 is December 5, 1706, and John Williams, a
Sfe olfe minister of the frontier town of Deerfield,
sk I jjjk has not been among so many godly Chris-
tians in nearly two years. Cotton Mather’s
usual 1,500-member congregation at the
Society of the Second Church in Boston is swollen
by many on-lookers, and Williams is the object of
their curiosity. A month before, the people of New
England had greeted his return to Boston after
nearly two years of captivity in Catholic Canada as
a triumph of the Christian faith. Neither the sav-
agery of his Indian captors nor the idolatry of the
Catholics he met to the north broke Williams’s re-
solve. His survival and safe return from the “howl-
ing wilderness” made him the closest thing colo-
nial New England had to a Christian celebrity.

It is Williams’s honor to deliver the sermon, or
“lecture,” to this righteous congregation. Whatev-
er trauma Williams suffered, it did not impair his
ability to craft a powerful lecture, and he is con-
fident that his stern message about God’s judg-
ment on those who were taken captive and those
who remained comfortably behind will resonate
with the congregants. First, though, he sits on
the church bench, surrounded by the truly faith-
ful — the Saints whose experience of their own
sin and redemption has been hard won through
great personal questioning, and thus is sincere.
It is a breathtaking experience, being among Pu-
ritan brethren after so many months exposed to
heathens and Catholics, months in which he was
denied any chance to fulfill his duty to his congre-
gation and to the Lord, prevented from preaching,
praying, and singing psalms. Worse still, Williams
had been forced to attend Catholic Mass, memo-
ries of which will haunt him for years to come.

Williams’s reverie is broken as the congregation
rises to sing a psalm. The sacred song stirs him,
summoning memories of his captivity.

000

Williams took up his pen to write a narrative of his
sojourn when he returned to Deerfield late in the
winter of 1706-1707. Just before dawn on Febru-
ary 29, 1704, he wrote, “the Enemy came in like a
Flood upon us.” He awoke suddenly as they man-
aged to “break open Doors, and Windows, with
Axes and Hatchets,” stormed into the room where
Williams rested with his wife, “with Painted Fac-
es and hideous Acclamations.” Struggling out of
bed, reaching for a weapon, fearing for his family,
Williams could not identify the invaders. To him
they were simply “the Enemy.”*

The raiders were in fact a combined force of Eu-
ropeans and Indians, consisting of more than 250
Abenaki, French, Huron, Iroquois, Mohawk, and
Pennacooks fighters. The attack had several mo-
tives: a colonial proxy battle in the War of Spanish
Succession, it was also an act of retribution for
English encroachment on Abenakis and Penna-
cooks territory, a ploy to gain high-value captives
(namely Williams) who could be exchanged for
French prisoners in Boston, and a strategy for
native population renewal. These reasons would
be sorted out later. The immediate effect of the
attack was deadly: fifty killed, over one hundred
taken captive. Roughly half of Deerfield’s resi-
dents were killed or captured — among them Wil-
liams, his wife Eunice, and their three sons and
two daughters. Two of the children died in the
attack, and Eunice succumbed on the second day
of captivity. The survivors traveled north, wading
through thick snow and fording icy rivers toward
New France. *

* Numerous historians have analyzed the Deerfield raid and John
Williams's captivity narrative. Of particular note is John Demos's
narrative history, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from
Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), which tells the
story of John Williams's daughter Eunice, who chose to remain
with her captors.

fOn indigenous captivity and adoption practices as population
renewal strategies, see Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indige-
nous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2012).

The Appendix Out Loud

On the sixth day of their jour-
ney, the minister was allowed
to lead his reduced congre-
gation in worship. “On the
Sabbath Day we rested, and
I was permitted to Pray and
Preach to the Captives,” Wil-
liams recalled. But the Indi-
an captors interrupted the
impromptu worship service.
“Sing us one of Zion’s songs,”
they demanded. The captives
complied, timidly singing a
sacred psalm. But as Williams
recounted, the captors “were
ready some of them to upbraid
us, because our singing was
not so loud as theirs.”

^ CetpeAnn

Deerfield •
□dy Brook a

® Massachusetts
Bay

Boston

Plymouth

Cape Cad Bay

Hartford
CONNECTICUT *

Schaghticoke

Reservation

RHODE

ISLAND

Nantucket Bound

agansett Bay

Aqulnnah'

Saybrook

Nantucket I.

Gardiners I.

A map of early Puritan settlements and Algonquian groups in the seventeenth century,
with Deerfield visible at upper left.

Wikimedia Commons

The ridicule stung, but it also indicated the
deep religious and cultural chasm gaping be-
tween the captives and their captors. To many
of the Indians, this quiet singing revealed
a more general weakness of character and
identity. The captives’ inability to sing their
own songs was disgraceful and deserving of
mockery, according to native traditions. Yet
some of the Indian captors were Catholic con-
verts, and the Frenchmen who had participat-
ed in the raid were also Catholic. As Catho-
lics, they couldn’t help but notice that Puritan
psalmody was a far cry from the sacred music
of the Catholic Church, which was complex,
polyphonic, and in Latin. For the Puritans,
sacred music (“Zion’s songs”) meant psalm-
ody, or metricized versions of the verses from
the Book of Psalms set to simple melodies
and sung in unison. Although austere and
plain, psalmody was meaningful for Puritans,
a fundamental way for the faithful to express
their devotion to God and their integrity as a
community. As a deeply affective practice that
allowed the individual to express his or her
personal piety, singing psalms also bound the
congregation together.

Puritan singing was rarely beautiful. Indeed,
by the early eighteenth century, congrega-

tional psalmody was cacophonous. For years,
declining music literacy and isolation had led
to the deterioration of musical ability in New
England congregations. Individuals freely em-
bellished the tunes. Congregations were un-
disciplined, not singing together, and singing
more and more slowly. Usually the congregation
waded through each psalm tune with each indi-
vidual improvising his or her own variation.

Since psalm singing was turgid and disorga-
nized in the best of circumstances, when the
frightened, freezing, and exhausted Deerfield
captives sang, the performance was especial-
ly sorry. The day before, four women had been
killed because they couldn’t maintain the brutal
pace of the march, and the survivors’ fear was
evident in their quavering song. Their voices
sounded thin and weak, buffeted by wind, los-
ing their resonance amid the ice-crusted snow
and leafless winter trees. Singing reminded the
congregation of how vulnerable they were, for
it highlighted the absence of protective wood-
en church walls to contain and reverberate the
music. Singing psalms was supposed to provide
emotional and spiritual sustenance, but instead
it underscored the tenuousness of the captives’
existence.

July 2013

Listen to "Litchfield" at http://appendic.es/rn/rn

Can we know what was sung? In his captivity
narrative Williams claimed that he preached
from Lam. 1 . 18, a verse that addresses the im-
mediate source of and reason for their plight:
The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against his
commandment: hear, I pray you, all people, and be-
hold my Sorrow: mg virgins and my young men are
gone into captivity. What psalm would match
these repentant words? Perhaps Psalm 69,
known for its evocation of the inner state of
the sorrowful and tempted singer lost in deep
waters, threatened by enemies, awaiting res-
cue by God. The tune to which Psalm 69 was
set in the 1698 Bay Psalm Book — the first psal-
ter published in North America to include
printed music — was thought to be particu-
larly consolatory. This tune is called “Litch-
field.”*

It is in a delicately modal minor key. The mel-
ody is made up of a series of intervals, broken
thirds and fourths in a disjunct motion that
enhance the searching, yearning mood of the
minor mode. Even as the tune comes to rest
at the beginning and end of every phrase on
the long note, the sense of motion and even
unease is always present.

It is possible to imagine Williams and his
fellow-captives warbling their way through
this deeply expressive psalm as their un-
sympathetic audience listened. They would
have been singing in their peculiar manner,
however: perhaps more than twice as slow as
this recording, taking two or three breaths
with each note, diverging from each others’
tempos, improvising on the melody. To the
listening captors, this weak and discordant
performance might have seemed to knell the
captives’ imminent disbanding as a congrega-
tion. The ruptures were dizzying: first seized
from their homes, then separated from each
other, and potentially cleaved from their faith
by a future conversion to Catholicism.

‘This is according to the instructions that accompany the
tune in the Bay Psalm Book (1698), back matter; see Richard
Appel, The Music of the Bay Psalm Book (Brooklyn: Institute
for Studies in American Music, 1975).

Humiliating and destabilizing as the captive
psalmody performance was, at least it was a
chance for congregational worship. Four days
later, on March 9, Williams was allowed to
pray and sing a psalm with his flock one final
time. After that, he and the captives were di-
vided into smaller groups for the remainder
of the journey. Separated from his remaining
children, Williams worried and suffered. But
he found some spiritual relief on the trail: “My
Master gave me a piece of a Bible,” Williams
wrote, and “never disturbed me in Reading
the Scriptures, or in Praying to God.” For
nearly two months during his journey from
New England to New France, Williams found
solace in psalms and Bible verses, though he
no longer had a congregation to sing with.
(Williams eventually found out that this tol-
erant treatment was not unique: “Many of my
Neighbours also, found that Mercy in their
Journey, to have Bibles, Psalm-books, Catechisms,
and Good Books, put into their hands, with lib-
erty to use them.”)

The situation changed dramatically once Wil-
liams arrived in Canada, where he found him-
self under the control of an “Enemy” far more
troubling than the supposedly savage Indi-
ans: Catholic French colonists and their Je-
suit priests. Williams and his fellow captives
“were forbidden Praying one with another, or
joining together in the Service of God.” He
learned from his fellow captives that “their
Bibles were demanded by the French Priests,
and never re-delivered to them, to their great
grief and sorrow.” The journey north may
have been exhausting and terrifying, with the
threat of death ever present, but that danger
was simply one of mortality. Being delivered
into the hands of Catholic priests threatened
their souls.

What followed was a series of clashes with the
Jesuit missionaries who led religious life in
settlements along the St. Lawrence River. Wil-
liams noticed the comparative successes of
the Catholics in converting Indians to Chris-
tianity. Whereas in New England attempts

The Appendix Out Loud

to convert the native population had proceeded
haltingly for six decades, the Jesuits seemed to
have found ways to lure great numbers of Indians
to Catholicism. The town from which Williams
was snatched, Deerfield, was directly tied to Pu-
ritan missionary history. When the first “Praying
Town” of converting Indians was founded in 1651,
the residents of nearby Dedham relocated to what
became known as Deerfield. Inconvenience and
sacrifice for the sake of the missionary effort were
part of Deerfield’s civic memory. Witnessing the
Jesuit’s triumphs in gleaning more native souls
than the English had managed was thus especially
galling for the Deerfield minister.

In late March 1704, nearly a month into his captiv-
ity, Williams himself became the target of Jesuits’
aggressive conversion efforts. Williams had been
taken to Fort Francis, north of Montreal along the
St. Lawrence River, where he met two priests. Lat-
er he recalled, “One of these Jesuits met me at the
fort gate and asked me to go into the church and
give God thanks for preserving my life.” Williams
rebuffed this obvious ploy to lead him spiritually
astray. “I told him I would do that in some other
place,” was his response, he noted later. The next
day the priests invited Williams to dinner, after
which they warned that his captors, as Catholic
Indians, would certainly force him to attend Mass.
After all, the Jesuits claimed, they “were savages
and would not hearken to reason.” Presumably it
was best to simply go into the church voluntarily,
and after all, “if [the priests] were in New England
themselves, they would go into the churches to
see their ways of worship.” Again, Williams de-
clined their invitation, citing his desire to avoid
the “idolatrous superstitions” of Catholic wor-
ship.

The third day at Fort Francis Williams was no
longer able to avoid the church; his Indian cap-
tor dragged him there by force, just as the priests
had warned. Williams sat as close to the door as
possible, fascinated and repulsed by what he wit-
nessed. He had never heard a Catholic Mass be-
fore, and what he “saw [was] a great confusion,
instead of Gospel Order.” The elaborate liturgy,
the polyphonic music, and the overabundance of
priestly noises paired with the ungodly passivity
of the silent congregation, were indeed far from
a Gospel Order that privileges congregational

An anonymous portrait of Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, the

commander of the Deerfield Raid.

Wikimedia Commons

comprehension and participation. One priest
delivered the “Mass in a Tongue Unknown to the
Savages” — what use was such a performance, Wil-
liams wondered, if those who listened couldn’t
understand the words? What’s more, another
priest was “singing Prayers among the Indians
at the same time” — cacophony and nonsense!
Williams grimly noted the ceaseless chanting as
“many others were at the same time saying over
their Pater Nosters, and Ave Mary, by tale from
their ... Beads on a String.” Compared to the sim-
plicity and clarity of Puritan worship, the Catholic
Mass was incomprehensible idolatry, the music
aimed at seducing rather than inspiring sincere
conversion. Williams was appalled.

Williams reviled the Mass he attended, and al-
though he was not permitted to supply himself
or his congregation with the solace and uplift of
psalmody, he at least was immune to the exot-
ic allure of the Mass and its music. Fortunately,
the Boston judge Samuel Sewall sent Williams a
psalm book (such “care packages” were carried by
one of the many negotiators from New England

July 2013

The Reverend John Williams House,
Albany Road, Old Deerfield, MA
in 1939.

Courtesy of the Boston Public Library

who tried to secure the Deerfield captives’
release for several years). Unable to lead com-
munal sacred singing — indeed, forbidden to
congregate in groups of captives larger than
three — Williams at least had the comfort of
the psalms for his private contemplation.
He was finally “redeemed” from captivity in
October 1706, and it was a relief to hear the
psalms sung by a godly congregation on his
return to Boston.

Interfaith conflict drives the drama of Wil-
liams’s narrative, in which sacred music in-
dexes religious differences. Yet despite the
fact that Native Americans were key players
in his captivity, Williams gives no attention
to the Indians’ music. Surely he experienced
native song; singing was an integral part of
traditional indigenous spiritual life as well
as that of Catholic converts. The absence of
native song sets Williams’s narrative apart
from other captivity accounts, including that
by Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan minister’s
wife who was taken captive in King Philip’s
War (1675-1676). Her narrative, published in
1682, includes numerous mentions of her
captors’ “hideous” singing.

Williams’s silencing of Native American song
is suggestive; Indians’ singing would not gain
Williams any purchase in the ideological bat-
tle against the Catholic French. Rather than

dwelling on the frightening vocalizations of
his captors, Williams concentrated his rhe-
torical force on the Jesuit priests. He made
the Catholic Mass the emblem of Otherness
and exoticized the performance of Jesuit
priests.

Williams’s captivity narrative reinforces what
we already know about religious life in colo-
nial North America: mutual distrust pitted
French Catholics against English Protestants.
It comes as no surprise that Williams used his
vantage as a captive among Catholics to high-
light what he perceived as their grotesquely
performative ceremonies and dangerously
misleading theology. Writing after his return
to New England, Williams was able to win all
of his arguments with Jesuit priests retroac-
tively. His scornful description of Catholic
sacred music fit the larger pattern of Puritan
contempt for Catholic excesses. Williams
thrilled readers with his descriptions of his
perseverance despite personal loss on the
trek to Canada and his unflagging defense
of his faith in the face of Catholic pressure to
convert. The Deerfield congregation’s forced
psalm singing early in their captivity, galling
as it was, signaled the Puritans’ unshakable
faith when compared to the incomprehensi-
ble liturgy of Mass. In Williams’s narrative,
music was propaganda, scoring ideological
points in the deadly transatlantic battle be-
tween England and France.

The Appendix Out Loud

Benjamin Breen's illustration is based on an early
20th century photograph of an Inuit shaman.

Toolemak’s voice

canning the horizon off the coast of Greenland in 1822, William Scoresby wit-
nessed the impossible: floating in the sky was an upside down ship. “It was,” the
whaling captain wrote, “so well defined, that I could distinguish by a telescope
every sail, the general rig of the ship, and its particular character; insomuch that
I confidently pronounced it to be my father’s ship, the Fame.” And this despite the
fact that no ship was visible upon the water itself.

July 2013

“I was so struck with the peculiarity of the
circumstance,” Scoresby noted, “that I men-
tioned it to the officer of the watch, stating
my full conviction that the Fame was then
cruising in the neighbouring inlet.” Scores-
by was correct: the airy phantoms not only
resembled his father’s ship but, like the su-
pernatural images seen by those with second
sight, were premonitions of it. Scoresby se-
nior’s ship subsequently appeared over the
horiln the same year, the captain of a North-
west Passage expedition found his ears play-
ing even stranger tricks than had Scoresby’s
eyes. Meeting “a few male wizards,” among
the Igloolik, George Lyon invited their “prin-
cipal,” named Toolemak, to demonstrate his
magical skills:

[He] began turning himself rapidly round,
and in a loud powerful voice vociferated for
Tornga with great impatience, at the same
time blowing and snorting like a walrus.

[...] Suddenly the voice seemed smoth-
ered, and was so managed as to sound as if
retreating beneath the deck, each moment
becoming more distant, and ultimately
giving the idea of being many feet below
the cabin, when it ceased entirely. His wife
now, in answer to my queries, informed me
very seriously, that he had lived, and that
he would send up Tornga. Accordingly, in
about half a minute, a distant blowing was
heard very slowly approaching, and a voice,
which differed from that at first heard, was
at times mingled with the blowing, until at
length both sounds became distinct, and
the old woman informed me that Torn-
ga was come to answer my questions. I
accordingly asked several questions of the
sagacious spirit, to each of which inquiries
I received an answer by two loud claps on
the deck, which I was given to understand
were favourable.

At length, the “voice gradually sank from our
hearing,” Lyon related, only to be replaced by
an “indistinct hissing” that reminded him of

the tone produced by the wind on the bass
chord of an Aeolian harp. This was soon
changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket,
and Toolemak with a yell announced his
return. I had held my breath at the first dis-
tant hissing, and twice exhausted myself;
yet our conjurer did not once respire, and
even his returning and powerful yell was
uttered without a previous stop or inspira-
tion of air.

What Lyon witnessed was an Inuit shamanis-
tic performance. Typically, these performanc-
es took place within a specially erected tent or
hut, the unnatural shaking of which formed
part of the uncanny effect. Lyon recorded the
ceremony, as he did many Inuit practices,
with an unaffected curiosity that allowed him
to be drawn further into Inuit culture than
most white visitors. His journal suggests that
the Inuit recognized his open-mindedness
and engaged with him more closely than with
any of the other members of the expedition.

©ic anfrcr.

Images of kraken, monstrous whales, and "leviathans" proliferated in early modern bestiaries. This engraving is from

Konrad Gesner's Fischbuch, Der zwolffte theil von de Meertheire (1 598), fol. 97r.

Wikimedia Commons

The Appendix Out Loud

Lyon and Scoresby had more than their north-
erly location in common. Both men were star-
tled by their Arctic encounters because they
were unable to demonstrate the origin of the
strange events in terms of natural law. And
in this they were, unwittingly, perpetuating a
tradition in which the Arctic and its inhabi-
tants stood for the strange, the sublime and
the supernatural. Since time immemorial
seamen had encountered the supernatural on
their northern voyages: they were wooed by
mermaids, menaced by kraken, whirled into
maelstroms, pursued by Flying Dutchmen.

These encounters were at best the stuff of
myth — images of an oceanic uncanny accru-
ing to all who had sailed in strange seas. But
Scoresby and Lyon were no ancient mariners,
no gullible deckhands. They belonged to a
new generation of explorers, who, from the
1770s onwards, observed the seas with eyes
trained in mathematical mensuration and
armed with scientific instruments — tele-
scopes, compasses, sextants, chronometers.
This generation could, for the first time in
history, accurately plot their longitude as well
as their latitude. They were scientific voyag-
ers, educated to turn unknown seas and un-
mapped shores into the calibrated lines and
accurate figures of the naval chart. Careful,
empirical, rational, they were not given to be-
lieving in ghosts or observing superstitions. 1

It was all the more significant, then, that such
men reported these uncanny auditory and vi-
sual phenomena when they voyaged in polar
regions. Georg Forster, the highly educated
and skeptical man of science who accompa-
nied Captain Cook on his cruise into Ant-
arctic waters, noted incident after incident
in which nature offered staggering sights
and sounds: “long columns of a clear white
light, shooting up from the horizon to the
eastward, almost to the zenith, and gradually
spreading on the whole southern part of the
sky.” Nothing fitted expectations; perspec-
tives were scrambled: “we saw the sea lumi-
nous at night”; “we passed by a large island of

ice, which at that moment crumbled to pieces
with a tremendous explosion”; “the ice is not
always entirely white, but often tinged, espe-
cially near the surface of the sea, with a most
beautiful sapphrine or rather beryline blue.”

So too the Arctic: with six months of light and
six of dark, with all-blanketing white-outs in
which ground and sky were indistinguish-
able, with compasses useless near the Pole,
the region seemed a zone where nature’s laws
were suspended, where the senses were over-
whelmed by the unexpected.

Visible science

and supernatural sound

The Arctic was a zone of the uncanny because
the supernatural was increasingly banished
from realms closer to home by exactly the
kind of scientific and technological culture
to which modern navigators themselves ad-
hered. The Arctic’s indigenous people fasci-
nated British travelers because of their very
obliviousness to the empirical, rational,
scientific culture to which ‘civilized’ Britons
were committed. Far from studying this di-
chotomy, many scholars of Native American
culture in the Arctic have simply perpetuat-
ed it without questioning the relationship of
their own work to earlier white idealizations
of people who seemed to exist beyond civili-
zation. 2

Arctic Indians stood at the inflection point of
early nineteenth-century culture — the point
at which scientific rationalists and their Ro-
mantic opponents articulated their oppo-
sition to each other and yet revealed their
mutual dependence. In other words, Indians
came to voice the persistence of a supernat-
ural beyond the proliferation of texts (math-
ematical, cartographical, statistical, literary)
that claimed to comprehend nature.

July 2013

In the Romantic era, science had demystified
the senses, sight especially. By the early 1820s,
the disciplines of surgery, instrument-mak-
ing, and physics had advanced enough to
enable anatomists and oculists to conduct ex-
periments which changed our understanding
of the way we see. After Thomas Young and
Charles Bell’s work on the eye, vision became
a subject for anatomical analysis rather than
religious inquisition. If it showed unfocused,
elusive spirits, these could be understood as
flaws in the eye or brain, medical conditions
rather than an actual perception of supernat-
ural beings.

It was the application of technology, as much
as the science of optics itself that removed the
supernatural from the enlightened world. But
technology also conferred an unparalleled
ability to manufacture the supernatural. By
the 1820s, engineers had constructed a se-
ries of vision-machines capable of produc-
ing ghosts at the turn of a handle such as the
phantasmagoria — essentially an updated and
moveable magic lantern capable of project-
ing magnified images through a gauze screen
into smoky air. The images grew and shrank
in size and fluttered as the air moved: they
seemed, like spirits, to have animate life but
no material substance. In 1833, David Brew-
ster, by now the foremost scientific expert on
optics, designed an improvement to allow
the phantasmagoria to project not just imag-
es painted on glass, but also reflections of the
living human body. Flesh could now become
spirit with the aid of smoke, mirrors, and the
latest precision lenses.

Fig. 4.

In 1832, Brewster published his Letters on Natu-
ral Magic — a book dedicated to demonstrating
how many of the encounters that had once
been thought to be supernatural were now
explicable as being purely natural. Paradox-
ically, this demystifying work related many
stories of hauntings and miracles, as if Brew-
ster, despite his intention of explaining them
away, was swayed by their narratives of belief
in a world that could never be ultimately re-
duced to empirical facts. Brewster’s ambiv-
alence about the supernatural was apparent
in his discussion of the Arctic: he related at
length Scoresby’s vision of ships in the air
only to explain it away as a manifestation of
natural law. Scoresby’s polar miracle was, in
fact, only a mirage, now explicable by the lat-
est experiments, demonstrated with mathe-
matical formulae and geometrical diagrams.
No longer did the Arctic defy scientific au-
thority as it did the evidence of the senses. Its
visions were reducible to abstract knowledge,
number-relationships illustrated by nothing
more sensual than a series of angular lines.

Yet as vision grew increasingly technologized,
the Poles became landscapes in which a dif-
ferent kind of supernatural encounter persist-
ed — an encounter dependent on a sense that
was not yet subject to mechanical reproduc-
tion and mathematical explanation: the sense
of hearing. Sound, whether inarticulate noise
or articulate voice, was hard to pin down. Its
origins, movement, and reception were diffi-
cult to fix and had not yet been captured by
technology — as the phonograph and tele-
phone were still nearly a century in the future.

Not just sound, but indigenous people’s use
of it, fascinated Victorians because they de-
fied scientific explanation. Thus it’s notable
that, as his chief example of the haunting
power of sound, Brewster chose none other
than Lyon’s account of his encounter with the
Inuit shamans who ventriloquize the voices
of the spirits — reproducing it in full. Even
for this arch-scientific explicator, then, the
encounter with the Inuit shaman testifies to

An illustration from Charles Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic.

Internet Archive

The Appendix Out Loud

sound’s power to elude the knowable — and con-
tains an attraction to and fascination with the su-
pernatural.

This is what Brewster says:

The ventriloquist ... has the supernatural always
at his command. In the open fields, as well as
in the crowded city — in the private apartments,
as well as in the public hall, he can summon up
innumerable spirits; and though the persons
of his fictitious dialogue are not visible to the
eye, yet they are as unequivocally present to the
imagination of his auditors as if they had been
shadowed forth in the silence of a spectral form.

For Brewster the haunting by voices is an illu-
sion — a ventriloquism, but he writes as one who
is convinced by it. The spirits are summoned. The
speaking persons are present to the imagination.
And so the Inuit shaman is a talismanic figure be-
cause he marks the limit at which scientific demy-
stification — a logical, textual discourse — breaks
down, precisely because the shaman’s oral powers
defy the explanatory resources of scientific meth-
od. The scientific mind knows it can’t be real yet
believes anyway.

In fact Brewster’s text and Lyon’s narrative testify
in their/orm as well as in their content to the capac-
ity of the oral/aural to elude them and the kinds
of knowledge they epitomize. Effectively, Brew-
ster and Lyon, following several earlier visitors to
the Arctic Indians, write a demonstration of their
inability to grasp, in their most powerful technol-
ogies (the textual technologies of measurement
and record), the Arctic natural world vocalised by
the shaman. In the process, they reveal both their
bewilderment at the ineffectiveness of their tech-
nologies and their fascination by people who are
not governed by such technologies.

To such Britons it seemed that the voices uttered
by the shaman, because they were seemingly with-
out body yet inhabited a body not their own, called
his presence into question. It is as if what became
manifest in the body of the shaman was the con-
dition of all voices — an unfixable, mobile sound
that moves through, but is not wholly possessed
by, a body.

Apprehended in the shaman’s body, the voices
that speak through him seemed like the essence
of speech/sound — articulated spirit, passing into
and out of body. For an observer educated, like
Lyon and Brewster, in the European tradition,
this voice is analogous to the Muse occupying
the poet (rates), or the god occupying the proph-
et (Cassandra) — a matter of inspiration. Thus the
Inuit becomes a present-day example of a figure
confined, in enlightened countries, to the past (or
to the uneducated) — the figure of the prophetic
oracle. For the Indians, however, the shaman mo-
bilizes the voices of the spirits who animate the
natural world — plants, rocks animals, sea, sky,
storm — and the spirits of the dead. By so doing,
he demonstrates his access to a real spirit world,
enabling him to interpret dreams, predict future
events, and cure the sick. In both traditions, then,
the shaman accesses power via possession. He be-
comes uncanny, a double presence: he is at once
himself and more than himself.

This uncanniness made the shaman enthralling
for many of the voyagers and men of science who
visited the Arctic. Although as late as 1750 very few
Britons had come into contact with Arctic peoples,
by 1830 a succession of travelers had described
both the Inuit and the ‘northern Indians.’ Most
of these travelers were employees of the Hudson’s
Bay Company (HBC) — traders who lived among
the Cree and Ojibwa Indians in northern Canada;
some were trappers who dwelt among the Inuit on
the Labrador coast; a few were, like Lyon, polar
explorers who met native people who came out to
trade with the white men’s ice-bound ships.

All of these Britons were intrigued by the shaman,
who became one of the chief figures about whom
they commented in their journals. When those
journals were published as travel narratives, they
established ‘Eskimos’ and ‘northern Indians’ as
oracular, sublime, ‘prophets of nature’ in Brit-
ons’ imagination — as well as ‘primitives.’ These
writings thus shaped Indians in a rather different
popular image from the images attached to more
southerly Native Americans with whom white col-
onists had had centuries of contact (stereotypes
including drunken savages, brave warriors, noble
innocents).

July 2013

One witness was the HBC trader George Nel-
son, who had more than twenty years’ experi-
ence of working with the Cree and Ojibwa. In
a journal composed in 1823 at Lac La Ronge
(Northeast Saskatchewan), Nelson recorded
his profound “astonishment” at the sights
and, most of all, sounds of the shamans in the
shaking tent ceremony:

only white man in the expedition, Hearne was
dependent upon his companions for survival,
following their lifeways and directions rather
than vice versa. From this position, he laud-
ed the power of shamans’ oral performances,
revealing a society from which belief in the
supernatural had not been banished in the
name of science and civilization.

The ratder is shaked at a merry rate and all
of a Sudden, either from the top or below,
away flies the cords by which the Indian
was tied into the lap of he who tied him. ...
It is then that the Devil is at work — Every
instant some one or other enters, which is
known to those outside by either the flut-
tering, the rubbing against the Skins of the
hut in descending (inside) or the shaking
or the rattler, and sometimes all together.
When any enter, the hut moves in a most
violent manner — I have frequently thought
that it would be knocked down, or torn out
of the Ground.

ich the
Indian was tied...

It is then that the
Devil is at work.

In 1795 a still stranger account of Indian sha-
mans was published — Samuel Hearne’s A
Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay
to the Northern Ocean. Hearne was an employ-
ee of the HBC who in the early 1770s, led by a
party of Cree and Dene, walked through the
Canadian interior to the Arctic shore. The

Hearne revealed that the shamans mobi-
lized spirits to cure and curse their fellow
tribe-members:

When a friend for whom they have a par-
ticular regard is, as they suppose, danger-
ously ill, ... they have recourse to another
very extraordinary piece of superstition;
which is no less than that of pretending
to swallow hatchets, ice-chissels, broad
bayonets, knives, and the like; out of a
superstitious notion that undertaking such
desperate feats will have some influence in
appeasing death, and procure a respite for
their patient.

Reading Hearne in 1797, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was fascinated by his account of
shamanistic practices and the belief these
practices engendered among the Indians.
Hearne prompted him to write poetry that
defers to the oral, as if tracing a passage of
sound too elusive to be caught on paper —
what he called “strange power of speech.”
In this poetry he sought to make the super-
natural encounter believable for his readers,
to turn them away from too materialist a cul-
ture. Coleridge explained that

I had been reading ... Hearne’s deeply
interesting anecdotes of... workings on
the imagination of the Copper Indians ...
and I conceived the design of showing that
instances of this kind are not peculiar to
savage or barbarous tribes, and of illustrat-
ing the mode in which the mind is affected
in these cases.

io'i

The Appendix Out Loud

The Arctic as a space of supernatural wonder, as depicted in
Gustave Dore's 1 876 engraving of Coleridge's epic.

Wikimedia Commons ,^8il

A new sonic aesthetic: Coleridge,
orality and arctic shamanism

Coleridge’s interest in Hearne was both psy-
chological and cultural. He wanted to remind
his educated readers of the power of imagi-
nation — of what they dismissed, when they
encountered it among uneducated peasants,
as superstition. Because its effects among
the Indians and Inuit were so startling and so
novel, they were less likely to be so dismissed.
For Coleridge it was sound more than sight,
and, in particular, the sound uttered through
the shaman, in which the supernatural could
be credibly apprehended — or rather, through
which enlightened readers could access the
belief that the occult manipulation of voice
embodied by the shaman does indeed give
them spiritual power.

their abnormality. They seem like shamans —
voicing spirits who utter through, but are not
circumscribed by, the body:

‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’
Coleridge’s greatest poem, was written after
his exposure to Hearne. The polar region, as
Coleridge’s mariner describes it, resembles
Hearne’s (as well as Forster’s and Cook’s) in
that it is a place of unaccountable phenomena
that defy mensuration — especially of myste-
rious sounds:

The Ice was here, the Ice was there,

The Ice was all around:

It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and
howl’d —

Like noises of a swound.

(lines 57-60)

The sonic uncanniness of the Antarctic — a
place at the opposite pole to enlightened,
domesticated, and charted Britain, a place
escaping the scrutiny of science’s visual tech-
nologies, prepares Coleridge’s readers for
the later emergence of the supernatural in
the form of voices emanating from sea and
sky. The zombified crew, for instance, utter
sounds that are their own and more than
their own, sounds profoundly disturbing in

Sweet sounds rose slowly thro’ their
mouths

And from their bodies pass’d

Around, around flew each sweet sound,

Then darted to the sun:

Slowly the sounds came back again
Now mix’d, now one by one.

(lines 341-346)

Intriguingly, the elusiveness of these sounds
is produced in visual terms — we see them fly-
ing like birds — although sound, obviously, is
always invisible. By describing sounds thus,
Coleridge asks us, as readers, to see what we
have no experience or possibility of seeing,
thereby causing us to doubt both the sep-
arateness of the senses and their efficacy in
comprehending the phenomenal world.

By the climax of the poem, sound is the chief
mode through which the supernatural is en-
countered, precisely because it cannot be
fixed or calibrated and because the reader
cannot simply translate it into a more mea-
surable form of data. The mariner is as over-

July 2013

come by its power as were the Dene who, hearing
the spirits voiced through the shaman, fainted
and wasted away:

The Boat came closer to the Ship
But I ne spake ne stirr’d!

The Boat came close beneath the Ship,

And strait a sound was heard!

Under the water it rumbled on,

Still louder and more dread:

It reach’d the Ship, it split the bay;

The Ship went down like lead.

Stunn’d by that loud and dreadful sound,

Which sky and ocean smote:

Like one that hath been seven days drown’d
My body lay afloat; ...

(lines 575-86)

Matching its form to its content, ‘The Rime of the
Ancyent Marinere’ offers itself as a vindication of
an oral culture. Still apprehended by indigenous
Americans and uneducated villagers, that power
would, harnessed in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s
new poetry, give their readers a taste of what their
commitment to materialist culture deprived them
of. It would alert them to the sensory and spiritual
deprivation that this culture enforced in the name
of measurable knowledge — and thereby puncture
their complacent participation in that culture.

In this respect Native Americans were vital fig-
ures in the development of a revolutionary new
aesthetic — a sonic aesthetic in which orality was
both supernatural subject-matter and the osten-
sible mode of artistic delivery: Wordsworth and
Coleridge made their poems as ballads to be spo-
ken, sang, and chanted. This sonic aesthetic had
spiritual and perceptual revolution as its aim and
Indians at its root, as Blake acknowledged when,
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he paid tribute to
“the North American tribes” who “practise ... rais-
ing other men into a perception of the infinite.”

The Romantic shaman was a new, anti-Enlight-
enment figure shaped by what scientific travelers
guiltily half-revealed: he was uncannily desirable
as well as alien because his voicings delimited the
explanatory power of science. This process had
consequences for real, as well as poetic indigenes:

making the northern Indian and the Inuit uncan-
ny figures conditioned the way Indians were seen
not just by nineteenth-century poets but also by
twentieth-century anthropologists (there was far
greater interest in shamans than, for instance, in
Inuit women, and in ritual than in domestic work).

In short, the process shaped Romanticism in
Britain but also romanticized, for both poets and
scientists, the Arctic into a zone of exotic other-
ness. It became a place beyond empirical grasp:
the real/fantasy land of orality about which those
living within the textual horizon of rational empir-
icism dreamed with fear and longing.

Notes

1. Scoresby designed a ‘marine-diver’ for taking
the sea temperature at different depths. See Fer-
gus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (London: Grove Press,
1998), p. 31.

2. A notable exception being Hugh Brody, The
People’s Land: Eskimos and Whites in the Eastern Arc-
tic (New York: Penguin, 1977). A modern travel-
er’s take on his journey in relation to this histo-
ry is Jonathan Waterman, Arctic Crossing: A Journey
Through the Northwest Passage and Inuit Culture (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

The Appendix Out Loud

"Vague Religious Feeling," "Upward Rush of Devotion," and "Re-
sponse to Devotion," illustrations of mental states from the 1901 book
Thoughtforms, by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater,

“To Wait Together upon the
Lord in Pure Silence”

Rachel Ozanne

“The voices of the past are especially lost to
us. The world of unrecorded sounds is irre-
claimable, so the disjunctions that separate
our ears from what people heard in the past
are doubly profound.”

When historians say they hope to retrieve the
“lost voices” of the past, they typically mean
that they wish to uncover the lives of people
who did not leave behind written records. His-
torian Leigh Schmidt, however, reminds us that
when we talk about historical voices, we can
also refer to actual uoices. The past was full of
sights and sounds that we can only imagine. Yet
if the sounds of the past are “lost to us,” how
much more are the silences? How did people
of the past experience silence? In the history
of the United States, one group in particular
spent a lot time thinking about and practicing
silence — Quakers. Because silence was so inte-
gral to their worship, Quakers, or Friends, can
help us understand how some people experi-

enced silence. They can also illuminate how re-
ligious communities use their understanding of
what constitutes appropriate religious sound to
define themselves.*

Quaker worship services have always consist-
ed of long periods of silent reflection. In the
late eighteenth century they faced challenges
to their silent practice from the rapid growth
of new evangelical groups, such as the Bap-
tists and the Methodists. Indeed, as Friends
ministers encountered the ecstatic, emotional
worship services of Methodists, they began to
define their practice of silence not only in tradi-
tional Quaker terms, but in opposition to these
evangelical groups. Whereas Quakers perceived
their own worship as reflecting godly silence,
they believed that Methodists’ loud, noisy

*The title for this article comes from a book on Quaker worship

practices. George Keith, The Benefit, Advantage and Glory of

Silent Meetings (London, 1670), p. 14.

July 2013

worship would lead them astray from the true
guidance of the Inner Light, or the Holy Spirit.
Quakers believed that such noisy behavior had
no place in the true Christian community.*

Late eighteenth-century Quaker ministers’
journals reveal that, for them, “silence” meant
more than the simple absence of speech or
singing that characterized their worship ser-
vices. Silence also referred to an internal con-
dition — one that minister Job Scott described
as a “silent introversion and feeling after God.”
Scott’s contemporary Elias Hicks explained
that silent worship was most effective “when
the mind is silently prostrated at the throne
of grace, and helped to be sequestered from
all intruding thoughts, and wholly centered in
and upon Jehovah.” True experience of silence
occurred only when the individual experienced
“entire sequestration from everything of an out-
ward or external nature.” Only then would his
or her soul be “permitted to enter into the holy
place.”*

Silence, then, required Quakers to quiet not
only their voices, but their minds as well. Si-
lence could also refer to a lack of speech — the
result of individual, silent practice. Scott ex-
plained that he sometimes “felt great caution
not to move in words” — not to speak during
worship — “unless a fresh opening induced
me” — unless he felt certain that the Light in-
spired him to speak. He believed that minis-
ters were “often closed up in profound silence
by the outward expectations of the people, not
having liberty ... to gratify those itching ears.”
In other words, ministers were in fact prevent-
ed from speaking, because the people around
them expected to hear something that the Spirit
did not want them too. Priscilla Hunt reportedly
described this phenomenon as “something cast
in my way . . . whereby the pure flowing of gospel
communication is obstructed.” Hicks believed
that sometimes it was the minister’s responsi-
bility to set the example of “silence” to other
Quakers by refraining from speaking, if he did
not feel genuinely moved by the Light to speak.

*By the beginning of the eighteenth century their ecstatic prac-
tices had been mostly tempered, but silent worship remained
central to Friends' worship. From its beginning in the 1640s,
George Fox and other leading Quaker ministers emphasized
the importance of individual connection to the Inner Light, their
term for the Holy Spirit. They taught that the way to achieve
this union with the Light was to practice silent contemplation
during meetings for worship. Instead of listening to a pre-pre-
pared sermon by an educated minister, any Friend could
potentially be moved by the Light during worship to stand and
address the group. During the seventeenth century, Quaker
silences were nevertheless characterized by ecstatic worship
practices; the name "Quakers" came from the way that they
shook and quaked when filled with the Holy Spirit. Thomas
Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2003), p. 13ff.

f All Friends' worship meetings featured a period of silence
at the beginning that would give way to informal preaching
by one or more Quakers, if they were inspired to speak. In
theory, any Friend could speak if they felt so compelled but
in practice recognized ministers spoke most frequently. They
were also most likely to leave behind an account of their
experiences because they often wrote about their ministerial
journeys. Though Quaker journals followed a general formula,
individual ministers frequently embellished their narratives
with reflections on theology and Quaker worship practices,
making them a good source of information about the internal,
individual experience of silence during worship.

The ministers’ experience of silence was also
sometimes painful — as though it were a palpa-
ble absence of God. Scott in particular recalled
many instances in which an extended period
of “silence,” meaning lack of communication
from God, became emotionally distressing to
him. In December 1779, he visited a number of
families in Dartmouth. He reported, “It was a
time of great trial: I was shut up in silence, pain,
and poverty of spirit ... .” He persevered in visit-
ing families in the area, but “still for sometime
found no relief,” because the Light did not com-
municate with him for weeks. Eventually, how-
ever, his “tongue again was loosed,” and his
“confidence” was “renewed.” For Scott, God’s
“silence”, or lack of spiritual communication,
could be incredibly emotionally taxing because
of his fear that God might never “speak” to him
again.

The Appendix Out Loud

In addition to internal practices of silence,
however, Friends in the late eighteenth centu-
ry defined silence in opposition to the behav-
iors they observed of both Baptists and Meth-
odists. Quakers objected to these groups’
worship services because of their tendency to
wordiness and speeches. Even though he had
been raised in the Society of Friends, Scott
went through a rebellious period in which he
attended Baptist services. He explained that
when he was young, he attended Baptist wor-
ship services because “Friends meetings were
oftener held in silence than suited my itching
ear.” He “loved to hear words,” especially on
“doctrines and tenets of religion,” and “the
Baptist preachers filled [his] ears with words,
and [his] head with arguments.” As an adult,
however, he returned to the Quaker church,
because all of those words at the Baptist meet-
ings failed to touch his “heart.” In 1790, Hicks
visited a group of former Friends in Vermont.
He recalled that they had initially been “con-
vinced of the principle of the Inward Light.”
Over time, however, they had abandoned “the
principle of Divine Light and Grace.” Instead,
“those who apprehended it their duty to teach
had got too much into words and speculative
preaching and doctrine — which soon pro-
duced discord and a schism among them.”
According to both Hicks and Scott, silence
meant that people did not become enamored
with hearing words but instead kept quiet.
This silence was necessary in order for them
to experience genuine, personal connec-
tion with the Holy Spirit. Only true spiritual
communion with the Spirit could provide the
truth, and Friends were not supposed to rely
on others’ words but their own experiences.*

*Of course, Scott and Hicks were both known for their
preaching. The difference for them would have been
that their sermons were unprepared, and that they did
not have formal ministerial training. Additionally, they
believed that spending too much time on doctrinal dis-
cussions distracted Friends from true worship. Beginning
in the early nineteenth century, Hicks would come into
conflict with Friends who had been influenced by their
interactions with evangelical groups and therefore want-
ed to impose stricter doctrinal standards on the Society
of Friends as a whole. Scott died in 1793 before this
conflict began. H. Larry Ingle, Quakers in Conflict: the
Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville, TN: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1986).

Even more disconcerting to Friends, how-
ever, were the Methodists’ “noisy” worship
practices. In 1797, Hicks reported that a joint
meeting of Friends and Methodists in Saint
Michaels, Maryland went very well, except
for the presence of one man who made “loud
groanings” while another Friend was speak-
ing. As he sat in silence, Hicks felt inspired
to stand up and inform the group of people
there of “the hurtful tendency of such incon-
sistent conduct” — the groaning — and he en-
couraged them to practice “stillness” in wor-
ship meetings.

Scott was less put off by this behavior than
Hicks, but he still believed that noisy worship
would lead the Methodists astray. In 1788,

* THE QVAKERS DREAM;

0 R,

h The Devil's Pilgrimage in England ;

p, - BEING

Aft infallible Relation of their feveralMeetings,

^teeklftgt,Sh ( k!ngr,Quk!ri|» : ftoitli>gi, Yellihit^Howllngt, Ti am*
Biifgiin tht Batdsi, undHlftngr In ih« Bdlltii With aNirratlaeof
«h»Vr fever*; Argunw»ti,Ttneii,PriJtclplci,an(l ftrarge D ftrlnr : The
Grange and wonderful Saunical Apparlciont,*r!d the appearing of ite
Devil unto them fa thaiikenala of* black Bo*r,s0,g with 0 r tiring c> r,
and * black man without ahead, cauliag the Doga to bark, the Swine
tocejr, and the Cat tel to run, to the great adnioniion of all that IhiU
read the lame.

irfOdBgfmteei for G. Horten, and are to he fold at the ffoyal
E*dung«iaG»rBhi!,»<$5.

The Quakers were originally associated with noise, not silence:
this 1655 pamphlet attacks their supposed "Shreekings, Shak-
ings, Quakings, Roarings, Yellings, Howlings, [and] Tremblings in
the Bodies." The accompanying woodcut shows Quaker women
parading nude and a kissing couple, amongst other sins.
Wikimedia Commons

July 2013

he attended a meeting at which the Friends met
“mostly among such as were not of our society,
many of them called Methodists.” He explained
positively that “some of their hearts have been
touched with a life coal from the holy altar.” He
saw in their excited form of worship a genuine
connection to the Holy Spirit. He was neverthe-
less troubled because they seemed “very unset-
tled, many having hurried forward into much
religious activity, being very noisy, talkative, and
almost if not quite ranting.” He believed that
their energetic worship practices distracted them
from “the truth,” but he remained hopeful that
they would “finally shake off their religious exer-
cise,” which indicated a hasty entrance “into reli-
gious performances without the pure leadings of
truth therein.” Scott implied that Quaker silence
demonstrated the patience necessary for a true
communion with the Inner Light, rather than
the distraction of the physical demonstrations of
Methodist worship.

For some Quakers, even being in the tumult of a
Methodist worship service caused great uneasi-
ness, because their style of worship felt wrong. On
one occasion, Joseph Hoag attended a service in
a Methodist meetinghouse. He was immediately
uncomfortable there, because the Methodists in-
vited him to preach from a pulpit, which Quakers
did not use. At first he concluded that he “could
not open [his] mouth,” because of the inappropri-
ateness of the setting. After sitting in silence for a
while, however, he felt “the Word of Life to arise in
[his] mind,” and he decided to speak to them. Ini-
tially “there was considerable whispering over the
meeting,” but he claimed that “the first sentence
spoken stilled them.” Despite his perception that
“Truth reigned” during the meeting, when it end-
ed he “felt a caution to take care not to be drawn
away by the affections of the people.” Instead, he
left immediately to stay with a Friend who lived
nearby, “away from all the noise.”

Just as Quaker ministers cautioned against wor-
ship services that emphasized wordy sermons,
they warned against the noisy bodily demon-
strations of Methodists and other evangelicals,
because they distracted from the Inner Light’s
ability to touch their hearts. Scott described sev-
eral meetings with Methodists in 1788. Though
at times he was encouraged by their occasional

silent behavior during worship, more frequently
he observed their noise. He explained that he at-
tended many meetings with Methodists and Bap-
tists during his trip to the south. He felt kinship
with them, because their “societies” were in their
“infancy” and their spirit was “near to [his] life.”
He worried, however, that they were “in imminent
danger of being stifled by a multiplicity of lifeless
performances.” In 1793, Hicks argued that “true
worship” would not reflect “the fruitlessness of
mere bodily exercise in our religious performanc-
es.” These practices, he claimed, were meaning-
less without “quickening virtue of the Word of
Eternal Life influencing and assisting the soul in
that solemn act.”

In the late eighteenth century, one religious
group’s “noise” could be another group’s pas-
sionate expression of religious fervor. Where one
group saw “lifeless” physical exercises, another
witnessed powerful spiritual expression. Quak-
ers understood themselves as a “silent” people in
contrast to the behaviors of their contemporaries,
like the Methodists. They defined silence not only
by their own practices but by comparing them-
selves to others: silent, and therefore genuine,
worship was not present in the loud, noisy, ecstat-
ic Methodist meetings. Thus, through their expe-
riences with Methodists, Quakers reinforced their
own group identity as a people who did not make
noise during worship. Methodists, by contrast,
used ecstatic worship practice to gain and consol-
idate a community, attracting a steady stream of
new converts. In either case, the community’s re-
lationship to holy sounds — whether silent or out
loud — was essential to defining who belonged.*

*This argument bears a certain similarity to Ann Taves's argu-
ment that Methodists disputed among themselves what con-
stituted authentic religious experience and what was merely
"enthusiasm." Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experienc-
ing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999],

This relates to Jacques Attali's idea that the "organization
of sounds is ... a tool for the creation or consolidation of a
community, a totality." Jacques Attali, "Noise: the Political
Economy of Music," in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jona-
than Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 32.

The Appendix Out Loud

Fiction Excerpt:

The Descent of the Lyre

Will Buckingham

For several years, I traveled in pursuit of a strange image:
an icon of a guitarist-saint with bandaged hands. Looking
back, I am no longer sure how it was that I first imag-
ined or dreamed of this image; but it must have been some
time back in 2005 or 2006, when I made two short visits
to Bulgaria, claimed home 0/ the mythical musician-king
Orpheus. On those two visits, I spent a lot of time visiting
mountain valleys and hillside chapels; and after my return
from one or another 0/ these journeys, the image of this
saint appeared to me — the guitar, the bandaged hands,
the grave expression. As time went on, this image came to
obsess me so much that eventually, despite the fact that I
am not a painter, I sat down and painted my jirst and only
icon painting, working in gouache on board.

There is and never has been any such saint; but having
painted the icon of this strange figure, I felt somehow
bound to him. Then back in 2007, I had the opportunity
to travel to Bulgaria/or a third time. On this third journey,
I set out with three things: a guitar, the crude icon paint-
ing, and the intention to write a novel about this invented
saint, this unorthodox Orthodox saint. His name, I al-
ready knew, was Ivan of Gel a, or Ivan Gelski, his surname
taken from the name of the Bulgarian village that is said to
have been the birthplace of Orpheus.

I spent eight weeks traveling through the mountains and
small towns of Bulgaria, accompanied by my guitar and
my patron saint; and I returned home with a clutch of
notes and drafts that eventually became my novel, The
Descent of the Lyre (2012).

in the Rodopi mountains, to his adulthood as an outlaw in
the hills of Bulgaria, to his success on the concert stage of
Paris as a guitarist, to his eventual return home as a saint
of sorts. Here, I reproduce three extracts from the novel:
three variations that relate, in one way or another, to the
story 0/ Orpheus.

The book is finished and is now in the hands 0/ readers,
but that original image of Ivan Gelski still stares down at
me from the mantelpiece. As I meet his gaze, I still feel a
shudder 0/ obligation towards him as his jirst and perhaps
only disciple. I had not expected to spend so much time re-
counting his life — his zhitie, or saintly biography, as they
say in Bulgaria.

Painting saints, it turns out, is something of a perilous
undertaking.

This novel, in the form that it has eventually taken, is per-
haps best seen as a series of variations on the theme 0/ Or-
pheus — following the life of Ivan Gelski from his childhood

July 2013

Extract One:

Thejirst extract comes from the very beginning of the book,
set in the village of Gela before I van’s birth. It tells the tale
of how the future guitarist’s uncle meets with his untimely
death, and how loan, even whilst still in the womb, has
already become a musician.

^3 | he music was already there before
fsSr j he was born. He lay in his mother’s

| womb and listened to her heart thud
like a tupan. His eyes were closed,
but his ears attuned to the rhythms of his moth-
er’s body — the unsteady ruchenitsas of her laugh-
ter, the slowing and quickening kopanitsas of her
changing moods, the steady pravo horo of the
hours she spent weaving at the loom. The music
was there, as if awaiting his arrival, lying in am-
bush for him as he made his way down the road
that led into existence.

He was the first of his mother’s children to live
beyond the womb, the first to open his eyes and
see the soft green of the upland fields and mead-
ows of the village of Gela. An elder brother and
sister, twins, had died the year before his birth.
His mother would later consider him to be not the
first, but the third.

The music was already there, not only before
his birth, but before his conception. His uncle,
his mother’s brother, had been a musician. His
name, also, was Ivan. And he plucked the strings
of the tambura with such sweetness it was said to
bring peace to the animals of the forest, to calm
the hearts of bears and wolves, so that they would
lumber away and cause nobody any harm. Like
Orfei, the old women of the village said: like Or-
fei, who once had been king. But uncle Ivan had
killed himself in the spring before the child’s
birth, whilst his nephew swam, no larger than the
length of a human thumb, in the many rhythms of
his mother’s womb.

They found the body hanging from a cherry tree,
drenched in a rain of yellow blossom. When the
fruits budded and swelled later that year, they
were more abundant than anybody could remem-
ber.

Nobody asked why uncle Ivan took his life. In

54 The Appendix Out Loud

times such as these — when the countryside was
full of robber bands who would cut a man’s throat
for a few coins, when Sultan Selim III sat uneasily
on his throne listening to a million insects gnaw-
ing at the foundations of the empire, when those
who toiled for a living on the hillsides were at the
mercy of the rich, as they always are and always
have been — in times such as these, what requires
explanation is not why a man should wish to die,
but rather why life persists at all.

A child, no more than seven or eight, brought the
news of the suicide. Wandering on the hillside he
had seen the man’s body hanging from the tree.
He ran to the village in tears. The dead man’s sis-
ter, on hearing the news, touched her hand to her
belly, retired to the house and closed the door.
Through her tears she murmured blessings upon
the child; and the child, shut in the singing, puls-
ing cauldron of her womb, listened as she sang
her brother’s name, over and over, two syllables,
the second stressed, like the uneven steps of a
dance: Ivan, Ivan, Ivan.

000

Extract Two:

I van is now living in the hills, having taken to banditry
ajter the abduction of his bride-to-be on the night before
their planned wedding. Seueral years have passed, and he
is now leader of an outlaw band. It is here, in the moun-
tains, that he meets with the Jewish-Croatian guitarist
Solomon Kuretic, who is captured while traueliny to the
court of the Ottoman Sultan. Ajter his capture, I van offers
a challenge: either the guitarist must play something to
ease the suffering of the outlaw’s heart, or he will be killed.

Solomon did not need to wait long. Ivan returned
to the encampment within the hour. The first sign
of his arrival was the gaidar, who ceased playing
his pipes. Then Ivan appeared out of the darkness,
on the further side of the hill. As he came close to
the fire, Solomon noticed the grave, bearded face,
the deep-set eyes that had something wild about
them. The new arrival, the Voyvod, spoke with
Boyko the standard-bearer, then he came from the
fire to the tree where Solomon was tethered, ac-
companied by the German-speaker. He crouched
down in front of the prisoner and looked into his
eyes. Solomon looked back, blinking occasionally.

For the first time since his capture, he felt afraid.
And cold, too, with the wind that came across the
hillside. His head throbbed where it had hit the
rocks. The moment he thought of the pain, it came
flooding back, and he winced. He could smell
Ivan’s breath, and the animal reek coming off the
furs he was wearing. The one who spoke German
muttered something to the Voyvod, who broke his
gaze and turned his head. The two men conversed
for a while in Bulgarian. Then the Voyvod walked
over to Solomon’s guitar case, which was lying to
his side. He kicked it with his toe, but gently, and
asked the German-speaker something.

“He wants to know what it is,” the German-speak-
er translated.

“Tell him it is a guitar.”

The Voyvod looked puzzled.

“Music,” said Solomon.

“Muzika,” the translator said.

“Muzika,” Solomon repeated.

Ivan Voyvoda frowned, and then muttered some-
thing else to the translator.

“He says that he wants you to open the case. He
wants to see the instrument.”

“You will have to untie me first.”

After a short discussion, Ivan leaned over, and
taking a knife cut the ropes that tied Solomon. He
said something to the translator, who had taken
his pistol from his belt and was pointing it at the
musician.

“Open.”

Solomon got to his feet, but he was stiff from long
sitting, and he wavered a little, steadying himself
by reaching out to the trunk of the tree. Then he
undid the latches of the case and opened it. The
top of the guitar glowed dull orange.

“Tambura,” said Ivan.

“Kitara,” the translator replied.

Ivan stood over the captive, watching him lift the
guitar from its case. As the prisoner picked up
the instrument, his hand brushed lightly over the
strings, which hummed in the night. The image
passed through Ivan’s mind, so fleetingly that he
hardly noticed it, of a blizzard of yellow blossom.

Solomon stood, holding his guitar in his hand.
“Kitara,” he said, and he smiled.

Ivan did not smile back. He spoke to the translator
for a few moments more, then turned and headed
back towards the fire. The translator, who was still
pointing the pistol at the musician, spoke softly.
“The Voyvod has offered you a wager,” he said.

“What kind of wager?”

“It is simple. He has gone to prepare a place for
you by the fire. Tonight, the Voyvod will give you
food and drink, and all the hospitality that is
proper for an honored guest. Then he will ask you
to play.”

“And the wager?” Solomon said.

“The wager is this. If you play with sufficient skill
to ease his suffering, he will spare you. But if your
playing does not please him, if it does not still his
rage and his pain, he will kill you.”

“If I am to die,” Solomon said slowly, “how shall I
die, and when?”

“Our Voyvod will make sure your death is quick.
If you have not succeeded by the time that the sun
rises over the hill, then he will plant a bullet here.”
The translator gently pressed his gun into the
middle of Solomon’s forehead. Then he placed it
back in his belt and put his arm around the musi-
cian. “But that is for later,” he said. “For now, let
us eat and drink as brothers.”

So the two men went to join the circle by the
flames, the tall, pale Jewish musician who held
his guitar in his hands, and the merchant who had
fallen on hard times; and when Solomon took his
seat, the haiduti welcomed him, as if he was al-
ready one of their number.

July 2013

Ivan sat on the far side of the fire, poking at the
embers with a stick.

Solomon shivered as the haiduti passed around
clay cups, glazed with green and filled with rakiya.
Ivan Voyvoda offered a toast, raising his cup, and
the men all responded, taking care to look each
other in the eye in turn. Solomon swallowed the
brandy and tried not to wince, but in truth he was
not feeling much like feasting.

The German speaker, who only now introduced
himself as Asen, and who became increasingly
voluble and friendly the more they drank, trans-
lated for the musician, and the other men pressed
him with questions about life in Vienna, about the
women there, and about his music. It would have
seemed that the band were a model of hospitali-
ty were it not for the fact that hanging over Solo-
mon’s head was the threat of death the following
dawn. Yet in this respect, he was no different from
the others, for whom every day offered the pros-
pect of a new and different death. Solomon was
not the only man on that hillside who was living in
the shadow of his own destruction, and perhaps
it was this, above all, that led to the sense of kin-
ship, even of friendship, that his captors felt to-
wards him.

Whatever the reason, they broke bread togeth-
er, drank rakiya and wine, feasted on fish pulled
from the streams and the rivers — silvered trout
that crackled as they cooked on the embers, and
on mutton and on blackened peppers that tasted
of sun. And although Solomon wanted more than
anything to keep his head, so that he might play
well — he had played for love before, for the hearts
of women, but never for his life — he could not re-
fuse the endless toasting, so that by the time the
evening was well advanced, he was singing haid-
ut songs along with the others, accompanied by
the gaidar, songs of bold raids, of fallen friends,
of hatreds and revenge and of quiet meadows
where the trees sang with the sounds of finches
and sparrows. And even though he did not know
the words, it did not matter. He made up his own
words, singing about his home, about the Danube
he loved, about Clara, about his childhood, so that
had he not been already driven half-mad by his
long journey, by the blow to his head, by the fear
that was growing inside him moment by moment,

by the drone of the pipes and the rough sound of
so many men’s voices, he might have stepped back
and wondered that this was a strange way to spend
what could be his final night on earth.

But he sang also because whilst he sang, the mo-
ment when he would have to play had not yet
come; because whilst he sang, he could imagine
that he was simply a traveller enjoying the hospi-
tality of shepherds and villagers, a traveller who
might, when the dawn came, depart on the road
that led east to Constantinople.

When the moon was high overhead, the singing
came to a close. The gaidar ceased playing, and
Ivan Voyvoda said something in a low voice, some-
thing that made all the men laugh, all except Sol-
omon. Asen did not translate. Solomon was sway-
ing a little, more drunk than he could remember
having ever been; and when he managed to focus,
he saw that there all of the men were staring at
him.

Solomon took the guitar and placed it in his lap.
He wrapped his arms about it and closed his eyes.
The world was pitching and reeling like a ship.
Ivan Voyvoda muttered something else, and this
time Asen did translate. “The Voyvod asks you to
play,” he said. “He asks you to play to ease his suf-
fering heart.”

Solomon ran his fingers along the strings. His
pale right hand hovered over the sound hole, his
left crouched on the fingerboard. He paused,
tested the tuning, and made what adjustments
he could; but because of the drink it was hard to
be sure whether he was making things better or
worse. Then he played a chord — an E minor that
set the four open strings thrumming — just to test
the sound. He ran through another few chords.
Then he looked into the fire.

What can a man play, he wondered, to save his
life? And because none of those things he had per-
formed on the concert stage were adequate to the
occasion, because an encampment in the Rhodope
mountains, surrounded by men who have just
slaughtered every last one of your travelling com-
panions, is no place for delicate Viennese waltzes,
for the fripperies of the salons of Europe, he sim-
ply let his fingers guide him. He played the light-

The Appendix Out Loud

est of passages in harmonics, echoed them on the
bass strings, playing in heavy rest-strokes with his
thumb, a melody that came to him from nowhere,
or perhaps from everywhere, from the long road
he had travelled, from his regret at leaving Clara,
from the fear that was settling in his belly, coiled
like a guard dog only half-asleep, from these hill-
sides with their gorges and valleys, their upland
meadows and rushing streams filled with trout
and fringed by green ferns, from the music he had
heard played in the houses of peasants along the
way, from the sky above with its incomprehensible
stars, and from the eyes of the men who sat lis-
tening to him, immobile, no longer even passing
around the rakiya, but simply listening. The melo-
dy inched its way up the stave, fugue-like, repeat-
ing each time, but never quite the same, a melody
like the river that, as some sage once said, one can
never step into twice, but that remains the same
river. There were waterfalls of arpeggios, swirl-
ing whirlpools of triplets, slow-moving depths
on the lower strings, clashes that were only part-
ly resolved before becoming still further clashes,
dissonances and tensions and cross-rhythms that
built upon each other until Solomon’s hands were
a blur; but somehow, out of this chaos of notes,
the same melody, returning again and again. Then
his hands slowed, and his left hand moved up to
the top of the fingerboard where the melody ap-
peared once more, modulating into the minor key
with such extraordinary sweetness that — had he
still been walking in those hills, had he not been
torn to pieces by savage women as a punishment
for spurning their advances — even Orfei himself
would have wept to hear it. Solomon pulled the
melody from the guitar in long skeins, drawing it
out like silk. And then the tempo quickened, the
discords becoming more pronounced, rhythms
of the soil and of the rocks and of the trees, un-
countable rhythms felt only in the body, begin-
ning to take over. The gaidar smiled and leaned
forward. He had heard nothing like this before,
and yet it was as if he had always been waiting to
hear it. His fingers twitched, following the flood
of ornaments and grace notes. Asen leaned back,
breathless. Boyko put his face in his hands, for
what reason it is impossible to tell. And Solomon
played on, as the sparks flew up into the night,
and the dead on the hillsides, unseen, clustered
around to listen, because it is not every day that
you get a concert such as this, and if the dead are

not easily roused, they are not entirely intractable;
and as the dead assembled, although they could
not be seen, the haiduti shivered at their presence
and at the strange spell that Solomon was weav-
ing, not a music of the head, nor even of the heart,
but of the hands that danced like ghosts in the
firelight, the hands and the body and the ancient
earth singing through the body and the sinews
and the blood.

Then the melody eased, became simple again.
Played on the bass strings. Echoed once in the
higher register. Again, but more gently, in the
bass. And again at the top of the guitar, but in har-
monics, clear and pure as a mountain spring, the
final note so quiet that it was not certain whether
it was played, or simply imagined.

Solomon opened his eyes. His head was pounding
and he was damp with sweat. He looked around
the fire. Nobody clapped. Nobody moved. Then
he saw Ivan Voyvoda: and tears were streaming
down the man’s face.

The Voyvod rolled his shoulders and cleared his
throat. His men turned and looked at him with
astonishment, for they had never once seen him
weep. He then let his head hang, so that the tears
fell into his lap. His verdict was murmured so soft-
ly it was almost inaudible. “The Jew lives.”

a©©

As the dead assem-
bled l although they
could not be seen ,
the haiduti shivered
at their presence
and at the strange
spell that Solomon
was weaving.

July 2013

Extract Three:

The jinal passage comes from a later section of the book,
loan’s encounter with Solomon eventually leads him to
take up the cjuitar and trauel to Paris; but the protagonist
in this final extract is not Ivan. Instead it is the Spaniard
Fernando Sor, one of the greatest guitarists of the early
nineteenth century, and the catalyst for Ivan’s eoentual
trans/ormation/rom guitarist to saint.

The sickness was getting worse, and the rain did
not help. It made him long for the clear cold of
Moscow. Or for the warm sun of Spain. But not
London, that wretched town with her mist and her
foul odours that drifted up from the all but life-
less river, and her squat, charmless citizens. He
longed for everywhere except London.

Ferdinand pulled the blankets more closely
around himself, and leaned towards the fire. The
rain was streaming down the window with steady
determination, as if it did not intend to let up
for weeks. Through the glass, he could see low
clouds, brown and heavy. He shivered again, and
muttered a prayer to the Virgin in Spanish, the
prayer that as a boy he had intoned every morning
in the monastery school of Montserrat, and that
was almost the only thing that remained of what
had once been his faith. These days, he only used
Spanish for prayers and curses, an exile not only

from his homeland but also from his own tongue;
and the memory of that monastery between those
strange rocks, where you could smell the sea on
the air, and where the hillsides were filled with
the sounds of the practicing choirs, was one that
made the cold seem even more severe. He sneezed
and looked gloomily into the flames.

This sickness had happened before, and he knew
it was not serious. He had learned to endure
much worse cold during those crystalline winters
in Moscow when Felicite, wrapped in furs, her
cheeks red as apples, would put her small gloved
hand in his, and they would walk through the
streets nodding to acquaintances and admirers.
She had been the brazier at which he had warmed
himself for those years in Russia, and despite her
small frame, he had believed then that her body
could provide fuel and warmth enough for the re-
mainder of his life, were it not for the others who,
his jealous eye had already long noted, clamoured
to steal a bit of that same warmth for themselves.

He had endured much worse, and yet this late au-
tumn damp, without Felicite to make him warm
broth and to put her arms around him and to re-
assure him that the sickness would not last, was
insufferable. Their journey back from Moscow
had been frigid, despite the clear and generous
sunshine that is peculiar to September and that
had blessed them for every mile of the way. It had
been so different from the journey they had taken
together from London to Moscow three years be-
fore, cuddling in the back of the coach, giggling
in lodging houses, when he had been astonished
at her youth and her beauty and the suppleness of
her body.

He heard a knock at the door. It opened before he
could say anything. He hoped it might be Felicite,
for he had not seen her for several days; but in-
stead it was Antoine Meissonnier, dressed immac-
ulately, an urbane smile that was impossible to
read on his face, and a sheaf of papers underneath
his arms. The sufferer sneezed again.

“Ferdinand,” said the visitor. “You are still sick?”

Ferdinand sneezed again by way of assent.

“I trust that Felicite looks after you well.” There

The Appendix Out Loud

was a kind of flicker in his smile that made
Ferdinand uneasy.

“Very well, thank you,” he said.

“She is acclimatising to Paris again, after so
long away?”

“I believe so. Antoine, please, sit down.” Fer-
dinand indicated to a chair.

Antoine arranged himself in the chair careful-
ly, crossing his long legs. “I have brought the
proofs,” he smiled. “Would you care to take
a look?”

Ferdinand reached out from underneath
the blanket and took the papers. He looked
through, nodding as he did so.

“Of course, you will want to examine them
more carefully when you are not so inconve-
nienced by illness, but you should find every-
thing is in order. It is, if you do not mind me
saying, a fine collection. A first-class collec-
tion. I am particularly moved by the Opus 28.
It was written, I presume, in Moscow?”

“Torzhok,” the other man said. “We spent
several days in Torzhok. They embroider the
most beautiful figures out of gold. I bought
a dress for Felicite to wear. We walked along
the river in the sunshine under the willow
trees...” The memory seemed to precipitate
him into a fresh bout of melancholy and he
shuddered pathetically, his teeth chattering
together. “Antoine,” he said after a few mo-
ments, regaining a sense of his composure,
“may I offer you brandy?”

“No, thank you,” Antoine smiled. “It is still
early.”

“You do not mind if I do?”

“By all means.”

He placed the papers down on a table, slipped

off the cocoon of blankets and got to his feet.
Antoine suspected that he was afflicted more
by sadness than by the cold that was causing
him to sneeze, and as he watched the sick
man pour himself a brandy, he wondered at
the precise reason for this gloomy humour.
Ferdinand drank the brandy standing up,
then he returned to his chair by the fire and
enshrouded himself once again in the blan-
kets. Antoine looked out of the window. The
rain was easing a little. “I should be depart-
ing,” he said. “I only wished to bring you
the proofs for your approval. It is, as I have
already said, magnificent work.” He smiled
with his teeth but not with his eyes.

Ferdinand propped his head on his hand. He
could feel the hot brandy as it burned some-
where half way down his throat.

“You are performing tonight?” Antoine asked.

Ferdinand nodded. “Will you be there?”

Antoine looked apologetic. “I am a busy man,
Ferdinand. I have an appointment to keep,
so I will not be present. But I wish you well.
I hope that the performance is a success.”
He got to his feet. “I should depart,” he said.
“Goodbye.”

Ferdinand opened his eyes and looked up.
“Goodbye,” he said.

When Antoine had left, Ferdinand coughed
for a while, as if he wished to remind himself
that he was still ill, and then he pulled the pa-
pers towards him and placed them on his lap.
He started to leaf through the pages. Opus
numbers twenty-four to twenty-nine. He
turned to number twenty-eight and looked
through the music. Antoine was right: it was
magnificent. He started to hum, following
the lines of the staves with his eyes.

The composer turned the pages of the proofs
and hummed through the variations. Outside
the window the rain continued to come down

July 2013

The Barbarian

Allegro - Con Fuoco For F. H. Par Ferdinand Sor 1827

in sheets. Somewhere not far away, the com-
poser’s publisher, the estimable Antoine Meis-
sonnier of the Boulevard de Montmartre, went
hurrying through the streets on his way home.

As the afternoon wore on, the sick man (let
us not call him a malingerer, for not knowing
the condition of his soul, we would be unwise
to sit in judgement upon him) tired at last of
sitting by the fire which had begun to burn
down in the grate; and so he got to his feet
and, taking the sheaf of papers left by Meis-
sonnier, he walked to the next-door room,
where his guitar lay upon a couch. He picked
up the instrument and slumped into the seat,
swinging his feet up, so that the guitar was laid
across his belly. With the flesh of the thumb
of his right hand, he stroked the strings. He
deplored the barbarism of Aguado, convinced
that the touch of soft flesh on the strings better
suited the intimacy of the salon. To play with
the flesh or with the nails? The difference was
like that between a harpsichord and a piano-
forte. So with the bare flesh of his thumb, he
played the opening phrases of his Opus 28. He
stopped before he even reached the theme.

What terrible weather, he thought.

The Appendix Out Loud

Urate 5 A

Solitude and S andaya:

The Strange History of Pianos in Burma

Jonathan Webster

- Jifr'i

^^yyiSSaaoc

I UJ

n a quiet evening in March 1988, Aung San
Suu Kyi’s telephone rang. The Burmese
expatriate was reading quietly with her
I husband at her home in Oxford, England,
when she learned of her mother’s stroke. Two days
later, she left her family in the UK and returned
to Burma for her first extended visit since the age
of fourteen. In her thirty-year absence, little had
changed politically. Although the country would
soon rename itself Myanmar, it was still governed
by the same brutal military dictatorship, and in-
ternal conflict had been raging for decades. To-
day, that dictatorship is the world’s oldest, and
Burma’s civil war is the world’s longest-lasting.

Aung San Suu Kyi at the piano, screenshot from the the BBC 2
documentary Aung San Suu Kyi: The Choice (201 2).

Aung San Suu Kyi did not intend to dedicate her
life to helping the people of her home country
when she returned to care for her ailing mother,
but events soon spun out of her control. Her fa-
ther was a national hero who had helped free Bur-
ma from colonial rule. A national memorial day
commemorates his assassination, and thousands
of student protesters carried his portrait as they
were gunned down in 1988. Her lineage and the
timing of her visit made Aung San Suu Kyi an ideal,
if accidental, leader. She soon relented to the call
of her compatriots and helped form the Nation-
al League for Democracy (NLD). In July 1989, the
army arrested key members of the new party and
confined Aung San Suu Kyi to her home, spared
imprisonment only because of her public stature.
She continued to lead, launching a twelve-day
hunger strike to ensure humane treatment of her
supporters. Her party, the NLD, won the election
of 1990 in a landslide victory, but the results were
ignored. Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house
arrest for most of the next twenty years.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, was
permitted to travel from Oxford to visit his wife
only five times after her initial arrest. He was de-
nied a visa during his two years fighting terminal
cancer because the army hoped Aung San Suu Kyi
might finally then be compelled to leave Burma.
She remained in her home, a prisoner of con-
science. Soon after one Christmas-time visit, Aris
wrote of his wife’s “strict regime of exercise, study,
and piano.”

The Appendix Out Loud

The poignancy of Aung San Suu Kyi playing pi-
ano in rebellious isolation was not lost on the

world. Concerned supporters reportedly snuck
within earshot for assurance she was still alive.
Famous Europeans who publicized her struggle
sympathized with her as musicians. U2 called her
“a singing bird in an open cage.” Annie Lennox
tried to send her a new piano. The top prize in the
Leeds International Piano Competition was re-
cently renamed the Daw Aun Suu Kyi Gold Medal
for its fiftieth anniversary.

Musicians have succeeded in turning the image
of her piano, sometimes singing proudly, some-
times rendered unplayable due to the unavailabil-
ity of qualified technicians, into an emblem of
Aung San Suu Kyi. Most of the world had long ago
already deemed her the principal, if not the only,
symbol of opposition to Myanmar’s dictatorship.
In a piece from November 2012, the Los Angeles
Times connects the dots, calling the piano itself
“a symbol of Myanmar’s struggle for democracy.”
This web of symbolism is easy for Westerners to
appreciate. The movement for democracy in Bur-
ma and the instrument played by its most famous
champion were both neglected and silenced un-
der tyranny.

The untold dimension of this relationship is that
pianos, often in less-than-perfect condition, have
been a fixture of Burmese culture since well before
Aung San Suu Kyi. A century earlier, pianos were
dragged through forests by elephants and ravaged
by termites in the tropical heat. Improbably, this
Western instrument became a focal point for mu-
sical innovation and cultural hybridity in Burma
long before it found international prominence as
a symbol ofBurmese liberation.

Before Burma was annexed by the British Empire,
the music of the royal courts and the homes of the
elite was similar to the musical accompaniment of
outdoor festivals in the countryside. Ensembles
in different settings used different instruments,
but the music was based on the same collection
of traditional melodies, the Mahagita. There was
certainly a division between “classical” and “pop-
ular” styles, but it was never as stark as the parallel
split in Western music after the Christian church
began to consciously distance its music from folk
music a millennium ago.

Burmese musicians playing traditional instruments, including the
pattela, at the Shwedagon Pagoda in 1 895.

Wikimedia Commons

July 2013

The penultimate Burmese king, Mindon Min,
was a reformer whose reign from 1853 to 1878
enjoyed relative prosperity, thanks in part to
high cotton prices resulting from the Amer-
ican Civil War. He learned of the piano from
a minister he had sent to England to report
on Western technology. When an instrument
was delivered to him as a present from the
Italian ambassador, he reportedly ordered his
court musicians to figure out how to translate
the music of the Mahagita into something
that could be played on the piano. These Bur-
mese may have had some previous familiarity
with piano music, but it would seem that little
concession was made to established Western
technique. Instead, the musicians used their
existing pattela and pat wring music as a ref-
erence.

Burmese musicians enthusiastically adopted
the new instrument, which they called san-
daya — but on their own terms. Kit Young ex-
plains how “a completely unique technique of
interlocked fingering with both hands extend-
ing a single melodic line allowed for agogic
embellishment.” She describes its sound as
“fleeting grace notes in syncopated spirals
around a steady underlying beat.” The most
obvious and seemingly natural element of all
Western piano writing was absent from early
sandaya music: the right hand playing high
notes and the left hand playing low notes.
Hundreds of years of Western music featured
melody in the right hand with the left hand
providing supporting harmonies. Burmese
musicians made no such distinction. The two
basic components of their music, melody and

*The pattela is a type of xylophone and the pat waing
is a set of 21 tuned drums played with bare hands.
Both instruments allow only two different pitches to
be struck simultaneously and this feature is built into
early sandaya music. The piano's unique ability to
imitate those traditional instruments was likely part of
its appeal.

Listen to U Ko Ko performing "When The Saints Go
Marching In" at http://appendic.es/m7j

embellishment of the melody, were equally dis-
tributed between the two hands across the whole
range of the keyboard.*

This method allowed for very rapid playing, and
the more notes per second that could be played,
the more complex embellishments could become.
By the 1930s, extremely fast, florid ornamentation
adapted from the style of virtuoso saung ga uk (a
type of harp) players was expected in all Burmese
music. The piano made such figuration easy. A
1980s recording of the famous U Ko Ko playing
“When The Saints Go Marching In” demonstrates
the distinctiveness of typically elaborate Burmese
ornamentation: the tune is almost unrecogniz-
able to Western ears. It is as different from clas-
sical or jazz piano playing as those styles are from
each other.

Sandaya was born in the courts of the last two Bur-
mese kings, but it blossomed in the cinemas that
popped up all around the country in the first half
of the twentieth century. The burgeoning silent
film industry, offering both movies made in the
West and ones made at home in Burma, required
a steady stream of experienced pianists to accom-
pany them. Burmese music was ideally suited to
the task. Listeners already associated different
melodic themes and playing styles with corre-
sponding dramatic concepts (such as love scenes,
battles, and scenes with horses). The songs of the
Mahagita had been used to accompany traditional
theater for centuries, creating a musical language
that was richly descriptive. Robert Garfias writes
of the silent film era, “Pianists were expected to
‘explain’ and highlight the actions on the screen
with the appropriate traditional Burmese music.”

Although the piano was not native to Burma, it
became a naturalized citizen within a few decades
of its arrival. The early sandaya players not only
invented their own technique based on existing
percussion instruments, but also retuned their
pianos to more closely resemble the scales of Bur-
mese instruments. In Rangoon circa 1925, despite
the British colonial presence, a person could sit in
an entirely Burmese audience, watch a film made
in Burma, and listen to music from Burma played
by a Burmese musician in a Burmese style and
tuning. The presence of a piano made it no less an
authentically Burmese experience then the pres-

The Appendix Out Loud

ence of a film projector. It could be argued that
their music was Westernized by the piano. But it is
more appropriate to see the piano’s arrival as giv-
ing birth to something entirely new: a distinctly
Burmese tradition based on a foreign instrument.

When Western listeners hear “world music”
played on piano, it is almost always the result of
a composer incorporating elements of other mu-
sical cultures into the fabric of an established
Western style. Folk melodies are quoted in sona-
tas; drones are imitated for meditative, New Age
effects. The evolution of sandaya in the twentieth
century essentially represents the reverse of that
process. The piano was a Burmese instrument
that gradually became a vehicle for experiments
with Western tonal language, structures, and fin-
gerings. To many, those foreign ideas were an ex-
citing addition to sandaya music; to others, they
diluted its uniqueness.

One of the most fundamental shifts in the sound
of piano in Burma concerned its tuning. The Cine-
ma de Paris in Rangoon adopted a policy of show-
ing Western films and Burmese films in alternat-
ing two-week spans. Two separate pianists were
employed to accompany them, a man named Ko
Oo Kah handling the locally-made films, and an
Anglo-Indian named Mr. Robbins playing for the
Western films. Once a month Mr. Robbins would
come in, complain about how out-of-tune the pi-
ano was, and adjust it to the Western equal-tem-
perament system.

Ko Oo Kah disagreed. The piano was retuned back
and forth so many times that the action of the
white keys on the instrument was eventually ren-
dered unfixable, leaving Ko Oo Kah to take ham-
mers and screws from the black keys and rebuild
the instrument such that only his music would be
performable.

Burmese aesthetic convention won that partic-
ular battle, but with regard to tuning, there can
be no doubt it has lost the war. Today, the orig-
inal intonation of Burmese piano is difficult to
find. According to Kit Young, “U Ko Ko used to
play with tunings on his midi-electric keyboard,
but for performances in studios and theaters, he
stuck to equal-tempered tuning.” There are a few
older sandaya recordings available in the West

that sound vaguely out-of-tune to our ears, but
they are more likely the result of heat warping the
instrument than documents of a true equidistant
heptatonic Burmese scale. The piano in Myanmar
still speaks Burmese, but its original accent has
been lost.*

*This scale was realized roughly on the piano by lowering the
pitch of the E keys, raising the F keys, and then doing the same
for B and A, respectively. In early sandaya playing, black keys
were generally not required. The clearest expression of Bur-
mese tunings can be found in saung gauk playing, where they
are also likely in decline. Kit Young, personal communication,
April 14, 2013.

In 2011, the isolationist Burmese military demon-
strated that they were not immune to political
pressure and shifting internal attitudes when they
released Aung San Suu Kyi (likely permanently)
and began a series of limited reforms. It is impos-
sible to know the exact motivations of those new
policies, but it is clear that some kind of change
is happening behind the curtain. Aung San Suu
Kyi was silenced during her many years of house
arrest, but she was not entirely isolated. She likes
to say that her daily habit of listening to the radio
probably kept her better informed than most peo-
ple not under house arrest, and she has emerged
confident in the company of world leaders.

It is helpful to remember these varieties of isola-
tion when considering the history of sandaya. As
Burmese musicians became exposed to Western
sounds via films and radio, they produced a vari-
ety of syncretic, experimental styles. Isolation did
not prevent this music from being performed and

July 2013

recorded, but it did prevent anyone in the West
from hearing it. As Timothy Rice explains, “The
reclusive policies of the ruling dictatorship have
retarded access to, and study, of Burmese music,
and to a significant degree they have limited cul-
tural and commercial exchange...” Only two discs
devoted to sandaya have ever been available in
America and Europe; one is long out of print, and
both are flawed.

The decision of many Western countries to im-
pose trade sanctions on Myanmar, suspend aid,
and boycott tourism may have pressured the dic-
tatorship to move towards democratic reform, but
it also may have impeded that progress to some
degree. In either case, dismissing the country as
an off-limits “outpost of tyranny” certainly has
done little to facilitate cultural understanding.
The obscurity of sandaya is the result of internal
repression, but also of the West’s own reluctance
to engage with Burmese music directly.

The two discs of Burmese piano available in the
United States feature Burmese musicians, but
they are recorded, mixed, mastered, and edited
by Westerners, and marketed towards a Western
audience. Lacking sufficient reverb and tradition-
al bell and clapper accompaniments, they do not
represent how most Burmese musicians expect
their performances to be heard. Sandaya: The Spell-
binding Piano of Burma, released by Shanachie Re-
cords, almost appears to be presenting the music
as an ancient artifact, preserved under glass from
a time before the military coup. Packaging san-
daya as the product of a happier Burmese past in
a clean, uncluttered recording makes for a more
palatable (and profitable) disc for international
audiences, but it shields us from the reality of a

Cassette tapes for sale at a Yangon market in 2006.

Wikimedia Commons

much messier, more varied, more interesting cen-
tury of music.*

* Kit Young, a pianist who lived in Asia for twenty years and
founded the Gitameit Music Center, is planning a book of
essays on sandaya and Burmese music in general, but she
acknowledges that translating Burmese writing is an equally
pressing task. "Outsiders must read these writers," she notes.
"It is only by learning the flavor of talk, the modality of
another ear appreciating music with the cultural detail behind
a musical event that we can begin to 'hear from the inside.'"
Personal communication, April 14, 2013.

More recently, the Gitameit Music Center in Yan-
gon has digitized 3,500 sides of 78s and recorded
interviews with older performers. The project
needs help to continue, but when it becomes avail-
able online it will be most listeners’ first opportu-
nity to hear sandaya unmediated by outsiders. At
present, the only commercially available examples
of sandaya actually produced by and for Burmese
people can be found on compilations released by
the record label Sublime Frequencies — but they
are still compilation cuts, not original records.
The Sublime Frequencies discs will soon by joined
by Longing for the Past, a 4 CD collection of South-
east Asian 78s to be released on Dust-to-Digital,
which will include two tracks of sandaya playing.

Myanmar is opening up, and Aung San Suu Kyi
is free. She is now more than an advocate for de-
mocracy and human rights: she is an active pol-
itician. As the West alternately celebrates her re-
lease and struggles to make sense of her puzzling
stance on certain issues of ethnic violence, we
might remember sandaya and the hybrid culture
it represents. The piano in Burma was more than
a sentimental symbol or an exotic museum piece:
it was an important player in a tumultuously cre-
ative century of Burmese music. “What the Bur-
mese have done with a piano,” write the compilers
of Princess Nicotine, “is so precise in the adaptation
to their existing form and melody that one would
think they invented it.” Yet this was not the case.
Perhaps the hybrid origins of the Burmese piano
and sandaya might point a way forward toward a
Myanmar that forges connections with the West
even as it retains a Burmese soul.

The author would like to thank Kit Young for her
kind assistance.

The Appendix Out Loud

Listening to the Past:

An African-American Lullaby

Mary Caton Lingold

My research tries to capture the sounds of the
past before the advent of recorded music. I’m cu-
rious about ideas that were spoken and sung and
shouted and strummed, focusing particularly on
musical sounds produced by Afro-Atlantic peo-
ple in the long eighteenth century. A few of these
sounds were transcribed into dots and lines on pa-
per. The descendants of others survive in thriving
contemporary music genres. These imprints con-
tain clues about the sounds that weren’t so lucky.

The musical expression of early musicians has not
been entirely lost; much of it has been preserved
or resurrected in a variety of print and perfor-
mance-based archives that are available for study.
In my work, I question the primacy of documents
in the pursuit of knowledge about the sonic past
and show that our conventional modes of study
can make it difficult to explore aural culture
through textual records.

In what follows I share an experimental encounter
with a particular song that found its way before
my eyes and into my ears. It is not the perfect ob-
ject through which to answer my questions about
the musical life of Afro-descendant people in the
Americas, but this little lullaby taught me some-
thing about how to hear the past.*

*lt also provoked me to think more deeply about the role of
ephemeral sounds in history. What about the sound of a pen
gently tearing against the paper of a used napkin? What
about the humming that accompanied the dishwashing as the
napkin was tossed into the trash? Is our imagination powerful
enough to render these events as history?

July 2013

JUNGLE MAMMY SONG

Margaret Johnson of Augusta, Georgia, heard her mother sing this, year on year, a, U*
had learned it from the singing, year on year, of a nep-o woman who comforted children with rt .
Tlic source of its language may be French, Creole, Cherokee, or mixed. The syllables are ^
for hinging; so is the tune It may he, as provisionally tilled, a Jungle Mammy Song, in the ^
that all mothers are primitive and earthy even though civilized and celestial.

Ah yah, tair uni bam, boo wah, Kee lay zee day, Nic o lay, mah

lun dec. Nic o lay ah pool a way, Nic o lay ah wah roee— At

yah, tair urn bam, boo wah, Kee lay zee day, Nic o lav. mah lun dee.

The "Jungle Mammy Song" from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag.

“Jungle Mammy Song” — a cringe-worthy title if
ever there was one. The transcription provided
by Carl Sandburg in his collection of folk music,
American Songbag (1927) explains:

Margaret Johnson of Augusta, Georgia, heard
her mother sing this, year on year, as the mother
had learned it from singing, year on year, of a ne-
gro woman who comforted children with it. The
source of its language may be French, Creole,
Cherokee, or mixed. The syllables are easy for
singing; so is the tune. It may be, as provisionally
titled, a Jungle Mammy Song, in the sense that
all mothers are primitive and earthly even though
civilized and celestial.

The compiler, though most famous for his work
as a poet and a biographer of Abraham Lincoln,
was a musician and avid song-collector. His Amer-
ican Songbag was published during an era in which
fascinations with blackface minstrelsy and “coon
songs” were giving way to more folldoric presenta-
tions of American musical forms. The book offers
arrangements of many different kinds of music,
including cowboy songs, work songs from rail-
roads and logging camps, and a sizable number of
pieces emanating from the black experience.*

*Sandburg was a labor-activist and consummate pop-
ulist who championed the culture and political causes
of the working classes. The American Songbag is em-
blematic of his curiosity about diverse traditions across
the United States (he traveled widely as an orator) as
well as the evolving appetites for homegrown music in
the country at large. For more about his life and work,
see the recent PBS American Masters documentary.

The Day Carl Sandburg Died (201 2).

The title of the tune recalls "coon songs" that
popularized racist stereotypes and mythologies of
African-American music. These representations were
complicated because they denigrated black music and
lauded it at the same time. Undoubtedly influenced by
the music created by enslaved people and their de-
scendants, coon songs were sometimes authored and
performed by African-Americans. This song's title nods
to the genre, whose popularity was waning around
the time that Carl Sandburg published the American
Songbag in 1927. For further reading on coon songs
and the ragtime era and their connection to (and
departure from) both white and black minstrelsy, see
Lynn Abbot and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black
Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs, " and the Dark Path-
way to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi, 2007).

The Appendix Out Loud

In the volume, Sandburg’s appreciation of
African-American music competes with his
choice to refurbish long-standing stereotypes
about “mammies” and render song lyrics in
“negro dialect.” The Songbag is no outlier in
this regard. It has long been common for
white authors to denigrate and laud black
music culture in the same breath. Many of
the earliest accounts of Afro-Atlantic mu-
sical practices include this type of reckless
and self-important ambivalence. Seemingly
uncomfortable with all that the term “jungle
mammy” implies, Sandburg wades into sexist
territory while addressing the derogatory ti-
tle by reassuring readers that “all mothers are
primitive and earthly even though civilized
and celestial.”*

Both during slavery and after, the power
structures of American society confined
many black women to the role of caretakers of
white families — creating a legacy of close yet
troubled relations between black nurses and
white children. In addition to the “mammy”
stereotype, this arrangement has long been
romanticized and idealized in literature and
images emerging from white perspectives,
particularly in the South. But rather than fo-
cusing strictly on the ways in which the image
of the “negro woman” who sang this tune was
degraded in Sandburg’s introduction and at-
tending cultural norms, I want to ask whether
this imperfect, highly mediated artifact bears
witness to her experience, history, and voice.

If we can mute the iconography of The Black
Mammy, what might we hear ? 1

*"ln the afternoons on Sundays, they have their Music,
which is of kettle drums, and those of several sizes;
upon the smallest the best Musician plays, and the
others come in as Choruses: the drum all men know, has
but one tone; and therefore variety of tunes have little
to do in this music; and yet so strangely they vary their
time, as 'tis a pleasure to the most curious ears, and it
was to me one of the strangest noises that I heard made
of one tone; and if they had the variety of tune, which
gives the greater scope in Music, as they have of time,
they would do wonders in that Art. And if I had not fall-
en sick before my coming away, at least seven months
in one sickness, I had given them some hints of tunes,
which being understood, would have served as a great
addition to their harmony; for time without tune, is not
an eighth part of the Science of Music." Richard Ligon,

A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados
(London: Peter Parker, 1673), 50-51 .

Because we do not know much about the
woman who is said to have comforted chil-
dren with this song, it is difficult to imagine
the contours of her life, much less the tim-
bre of her voice. We are left to wonder many
things like, did she work as a nurse and if so,
how did she feel about her job? Did she sing
this song to her own children? What other
musical practices did she participate in? As
a researcher, I would love to verify that the
song was originally authored or transmitted
by a newly enslaved person or from an es-
tablished slave culture, since both scenarios
would strengthen the song’s ties to early Af-
ro-diasporic musical practices. Whatever the
case may be, the musical transcription is a
rare artifact because it connects listeners to
the artistry of a female singer whose musical
expression would otherwise be lost to usd

f I haven't been able to identify a particular creole origin of the
words and it may well be that the description is right in that the
words are a blend of different language traditions.

Though little is clear about the vocalist’s biog-
raphy, we do know something about the way
her song was circulated. She is said to have
“comforted children” with it and Margaret
Johnson’s mother appears to have done the
same, transmitting the piece across at least
three generations as it was sung “year on
year .” 2

I am curious about why the music made such
a strong impression on those who encoun-
tered it. Perhaps the original singer had an
especially beautiful voice or an especially
beautiful way with children. Maybe she sang
it passionately to honor the memory of a par-
ticular child who had loved the piece — a first
born or a dear younger sister. Or alternatively,
perhaps she invented the song to shush fussy
white children with a supposedly “authentic
negro” lullaby as a kind of joke or a subtle act
of resistance. Or the tune could have entered
Sandburg’s Songbag simply because it is catchy
and easy to remember.

July 2013

Whatever the original inspirations for the melody
might have been, the history of its circulation is
a testimony to its resonance with listeners. It en-
dures, year on year.

The song is so resonant, in fact, that it found its
way from Sandburg’s page into my voice — and
from there, into the voices of a new generation.
When I first thumbed my way through the facsim-
ile of American Songbag that my mother had ordered
for me over the Internet on a whim, “Jungle Mam-
my Song” immediately caught my eye. At first
disgusted by the title, I was then intrigued by the
headnote and even more so by the undecipherable
lyrics. I wanted to learn it so that I could hear it,
hoping that it would yield some sonic information
about the early music cultures I study. I also won-
dered if the music-making would be able to drown
out Sandburg’s disrespectful story-telling.

Learning the song was a process of creation as
well as discovery. At first using a mandolin to
pluck out the notes, I learned the melody and fi-
nally the words — an interesting task because the
unfamiliar language required a lot of guesswork.
In addition to selecting a key, note values, and
time-signature, the arranger took it upon them-
selves to punctuate the words in the same way
that they would familiar syntax. Lyrics are often
accompanied by dashes and commas that indicate
the manner in which they should be expressed
musically.

It seems bizarre to do this to an unknown lan-
guage, but the directions helped me to deliver
word-strings as musical phrases. The arranger
probably followed the musical line when deciding
how to punctuate the lyrics, rather than the other
way around. Here is a recording of one of my early
attempts to render the song:

Listen to an early attempt by the author to render the
lullaby at http://appendic.es/m/w

I immediately enjoyed singing the melody and es-
pecially the expressive first words, “Ah yah.” The
relaxed, open syllables and the descending notes
feel quite a bit like sighing. Though I love the way
the song feels in my voice, I am not entirely taken

with my musical interpretation. In the recording
you will notice that my vocal style is informed
by classical singing and that I use a vibrato and a
clear “attack” in my pronunciation. By that I mean
that the syllables are not obscured by elision and
the initial parts of words and notes are articulated
more forcefully than they might be in other tradi-
tions.

When I learn music by reading, I find it difficult
not to perform in the conventions of my classical
training; much as a long-dormant accent emerges
when I go home to my native East Texas. Context is
everything. By contrast, in my activities as a blue-
grass fiddler, I learn primarily by ear. Bluegrass
is one of many music traditions that prides itself
on a dependence on aural transmission. When I
learn a fiddle tune, or a vocal melody by ear, I find
it much easier to be expressive in my initial inter-
pretations. To be sure, many classically trained
musicians have a deft facility with sheet music and
can perform it with far greater flexibility.*

*When you ask for help learning a tune, you will never hear
someone suggest that you purchase a book of sheet music and
learn it. They will recommend that you listen to famous recordings
or that you learn new tunes directly from another player. This is
also true in jazz circles, where sheet music and charts play an im-
portant role, but are nearly eclipsed by an emphasis on recording
history and classic interpretations. I find it telling that we "learn by
ear" rather than learn by listening. No one would ever say that
they learn sheet music "by seeing." The subtle implication is that
learning by ear is somehow natural, and thereby less studied. I
can assure you that it takes a lot of work to be able to learn music
by ear efficiently.

I bring up issues of acquisition and style because
they are uniquely challenging when singing (or
transcribing) for historical purposes. Because I
study an early oral music culture in which there
are very few transcriptions and no audio-record-
ings, I am interested in gleaning whatever infor-
mation I can from sources that might otherwise
seem only distantly connected to earlier centuries.

It is so rare to find an example of women’s music
from this period, and I wanted to do this song and
its original performer justice. But I felt inhibit-
ed by my performance style and frustrated that I
would never be able to really know how the wom-
an who popularized this song would have sung it.
Because my interest is in vernacular music and its
aural circulation, it felt odd to encounter the piece
through a textual transcription.

The Appendix Out Loud

I decided to enlist some help. What if I shared
the song with someone else so that I could
hear it outside of my own voice? How might
that open up possibilities for interpreting the
piece? I teach a singing class to young women
between the ages of seven and fourteen at a
non-profit children’s theatre. Every once in a
while I throw a strange tune at the students
and let them in on my research. I explained
that the song was a lullaby. It was original-
ly sung by an African-American woman in
Georgia, probably just after the era of slavery
and it had been passed from woman to child.
Though some of the students in my class read
music, we learn by ear. I handed out copies
of the song made directly from the book, but
without the title or headnote.*

Ah yah, tair um bam, boo wah, Kee lay zee
day, Nic o lay, mah lun dee.

Nico lay ah poot a way, Nic o lay ah wah
mee —

Ah yah, tair um bam boo wah, Kee lay zee
day, Nic o lav. mah lun dee.

Before learning to sing it, we talked about
what the words might mean. They laughed
hard at “poot a way” . . . and not just because it
sounds like a reference to flatulence, but be-
cause several of the young women are native
Spanish speakers and one of the syllable com-
binations sounds like a particularly bad curse
word in that language. The girls were fixated
on “bam, boo” possibly meaning something
about bamboo trees and a forest. We all de-
cided that “Wah me” sounds like “Why me?”

Though it was impossible to locate a fixed
meaning, thinking through the possibilities
allowed us to imagine certain emotional sce-
narios that would help us musically express
the song. My students ended up interpreting
the piece much as I had, but they added their
own touches.

Listen to the students sing the lullaby at http://appendic.es/m/x

We made this recording soon after learning
the song. At first, I hesitated to share it be-
cause the singers don’t perform particularly
well. However, I think that some of what we
might hear as ‘errors’ in terms of technique
open up possibilities for new interpretations
and can teach us quite a bit about the process
of oral circulation. In the recording, the young
singers are more playful with pitch than I am
and because I have no verification that Sand-
burg’s transcription is accurate by any means,
it’s fun to imagine that by failing to execute
the lyrics or music perfectly, they may not be
any more ‘incorrect’ than his version.

After all, wouldn’t a song like this have
changed from woman to child, from day to
day, from generation to generation? I love
the way the girls’ pitch slides throughout the
piece, as if their voices are determined to find
a more comfortable key. They reach unison
on certain notes and stray and wander on
others.

This rough performance exemplifies music
as a process: how a single piece of music can
evolve as it circulates across voices and time.

It is, in a way, a sonic illustration of musical
variation, helping us to perceive how a tune
can exist in various forms and still be consid-
ered a single entity. Also, by encountering the
song through a multi-vocal recording, we can
lift it off the page and back into the realm of
the vernacular. Though I don’t wish to over-
state the distinction between the two modes
or to romanticize the one over the other, my
point is that the media through which we en-
counter music makes a strong impression on
our understanding of it. Because I am inter-
ested in exploring vernacular music cultures

*1 decided not to use the title "Jungle Mammy Song" when I introduced it to the young women because I didn't want to taint
their musical encounter with the stereotype. Because I don't normally teach history or literature to ten-year-olds, I chickened out
and kept the story simple. In retrospect, I think it would have been worthwhile possibly to lay all the cards on the table and
explain the context of the American Songbag and the negative stereotypes that it participated in. On the other hand, I'm glad
that we were able to explore the song together without reproducing the stereotype.

July 2013

historically, restoring transcriptions to aural
performances is a useful way to de-privilege
print and text in our efforts to hear the past.

Here is an example of one of the students, Na-
dia, performing the piece solo.

Listen to Nadia sing the lullaby solo at
http://appendic.es/m/y

By sharing the lullaby with a new generation
of singers, I have been able to experience the
song as far outside its textual representation
as I can as a historical observer. Margaret
Johnson’s story, Sandburg’s title and narra-
tion, and the transcription into sheet music
all threatened to overpower the possibil-
ity that the song could speak its own histo-
ry. Though I wanted to listen to the woman
who initiated the chain of transmission that
brought the piece to me, I continued to be
distracted by the writing that accompanied it.

I felt persuaded that the song was a lullaby,
for example, and because I myself shared the
piece with children, I wanted to interpret the
music and my encounter with it as something
connected to childcare and a genre of mu-
sic-making predominated by women. Maybe
one can’t press a mute button on stereotypes.
Now, having written this essay, I realize that
by listening to the sounds themselves in the
form of my students’ performances, I learned
more than I anticipated about the nature of
aural transmission and music transcription.

But what of the singer whose story I longed
to uncover?

Though she remains distant and opaque to
me, hidden among the silences of history and
the words framing her performance in the
book, her music is frequently in my ears and
on my mind. It may be that knowing her song
means simply that, to know it. Listening is
often understood as a means to receive rather

than perceive information. (“I hear you” and
“I’m listening” come across a bit differently
than “I see what you mean.”) By staging op-
portunities to listen to historical performanc-
es, we can mobilize both our fields of percep-
tion and reception. Emphasizing auditory
culture also helps us to engage with historical
actors who did not author their own narra-
tives in print as subjects rather than as sim-
ple objects of history. The song, then, is not
a portal into an understanding of a particular
woman’s story, but an opportunity to witness
something that her voice made known. Rath-
er than repackaging the music and its creator
like Sandburg did, this time, I’d rather just
listen . 3

I wish to thank the young women in my sing-
ing class for sharing their voices with me and
for challenging my assumptions. I dedicate
this essay to them and to the memory of the
woman who first sang this song.

The author would like to acknowledge Whit-
ney Trettien, Darren Mueller, Ben Breen, and
the Appendix editorial team for their insight-
ful contributions to this essay.

The Appendix Out Loud

Notes

1. The Association of Black Women Histori-
ans’ open letter to fans of the book and film
adaptation, The Help (2011) is an excellent
primer on stereotypes of black domestic
workers in the Jim Crow South and how they
serve to misrepresent the history and legacy
of black domestic workers.

I am inspired by the work of Jade Davis,
whose website Vintage Black Beauties celebrates
early photography of black women. Some of
the archival images she circulates are visually
framed according to racist and primitivist ste-
reotypes of the sort that Sandburg’s terrible
title recalls. She has written about how she
attempts to override the power of the stereo-
types in her digital circulation by “whisper-
ing” to the women in the images as well as
contemporary black female viewers, “you are
beautiful.”

2. Offering another example of the oral trans-
mission of music from Afro-Atlantic woman
to child, W.E.B. Dubois wrote about a song
that was passed down in his family from his
great-great-grandmother, who had been en-
slaved by a Dutch trader in the eighteenth
century. W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk,
Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg &
Co., 1903), 254.

3. In the introduction to Audible Past: Cultural
Origins of Sound Production, Jonathan Sterne
describes the way our relationship to sound
is culturally constructed and historically
specific. In what he dubs the “audiovisual
litany,” he lists common assumptions about
the nature of hearing that scholars of sound
should question: “hearing is spherical, vision
is directional; hearing immerses its subject,
vision offers a perspective; sounds come to
us, but vision travels to its object; hearing is
concerned with interiors, vision is concerned
with surfaces.” Jonathan Sterne, Audible Past:
Cultural Origins of Sound Production (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), 15.

Inside the American Museum of Natural
History’s Hidden Masterpiece

Jonathan Meiburg

Visitors to the American Museum of Natural His-
tory’s popular Butterfly Conservatory could be
forgiven a moment’s confusion when they enter
the exhibit through an archway marked ‘Birds
of the Pacific.’ A framed mayoral proclamation,
signed by Ed Koch in 1989, hangs on the wall by
the entrance. It commemorates the fiftieth anni-
versary of the museum’s Whitney Wing “and its
two public exhibitions, the Whitney Hall of Oce-
anic Birds and the Sanford Hall of Bird Life, which
have enlightened millions of students, scholars,
and visitors from around the world and will con-
tinue to be sources of knowledge and enjoyment
for generations to come.” 1

Neither hall, however, really exists any more. The
Sanford hall was dismantled in 1999 to make room
for an expansion of the planetarium, and the Whit-
ney hall’s fate is ambiguous: like an abandoned
subway station, it can be glimpsed, but is most-
ly hidden. Ten of its eighteen dioramas are con-
cealed behind the conservatory’s cocoon-shaped
enclosure, where live tropical butterflies land on
visitors’ heads and outstretched fingers.*

*As of this writing, the museum's official web site [www.
AMNH.org] does not list the Whitney hall among its permanent
exhibitions, and mentions it only as the location of the Butterfly
Conservatory. The museum's Wikipedia page also does not
mention the Whitney hall, even in a section devoted to "The art
of the diorama."

The Appendix Out Loud

The Whitney hall was once one of the crown j ewels
of the museum, alongside the halls of African and
North American mammals, and like them it was a
reminder of a time when the museum pushed the
boundaries of dioramas as educational objects
and as art. Over the years, even as range maps
and species names have become outdated, the art
has remained potent; the mammal halls’ diora-
mas retain an eerie, sublime power. At their best
they seem deeply and strangely alive. The Hall of
North American Mammals was lovingly restored
and reopened in 2012, and the numinous indoor
courtyard of the African hall, whose dark-paneled
galleries surround a parading family of elephants,
remains the museum’s literal and figurative cen-
terpiece. But of the three halls, the Whitney might
have been the most ambitious, if not quite in gran-
deur, then at least in scope. Oceanic birds were its
alleged focus, but its true aim was to create “the
Pacific in microcosm,” cramming the landscapes,
seascapes, and feathered wildlife of nearly half the
globe — all Oceania — into one room.

The hall was the brainchild of Frank Chapman,
the visionary chairman of the museum’s Depart-
ment of Ornithology, and Leonard C. Sanford, a
deep-pocketed New Haven surgeon with an orni-
thology habit. Chapman arrived at the museum as
a volunteer in 1887 and didn’t retire until 1942, at
age 78. He more or less acquired Sanford along the
way: in 1912, Chapman convinced him to store his
personal collection of bird skins at the museum
and installed him in an office next to Chapman’s
as an unofficial member of the staff.

It was a shrewd, if unconventional, move. Sanford
was well-connected, ambitious, persuasive, and
competitive, especially with his friends at Har-
vard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Robert
Cushman Murphy, who came to the museum as a
young man in 1912 and later chaired the depart-
ment after Chapman retired, noted that Sanford
“particularly enjoyed possessing things which the
other fellow did not have, and partly because the
other fellow did not have them.”

Sanford’s new position let him scratch this itch in
ways he could only have imagined as a private col-
lector. He was especially keen to send collecting
expeditions to poorly-surveyed parts of the world,
and he had a gift for convincing his well-heeled

The dome above the Whitney Hall as it looks today.

Branan Edgens

The dome above the Whitney Hall as it originally appeared.

AMNH Photo #315991

July 2013

Rollo Beck preparing the skin of a tropicbird aboard the France
on the Whitney South Seas Expedition.

AMNH Photo #107954

ing oily bits of meat and offal from the boat as
he drifted with the current, then rowing back
and picking off the birds that collected to
scavenge on the slick. This technique amazed
Beck’s companions, who couldn’t understand
how he could so confidently set out to bag
seabirds where there weren’t any to be seen,
but he knew from experience that seabirds
can detect food from miles away just as tur-
key vultures do on land - with a keen sense
of smell. Beck’s wife, Ida, who often accom-
panied him on collecting trips, sometimes
waited for him on the shores of Monterey Bay
until well after dark.*

friends to share his enthusiasm. It was a
golden age for field ornithology; steamships,
railroads, and the fledgling automobile had
made the world newly accessible, but vast re-
gions remained unsurveyed. Sanford’s first
major effort was a marine expedition to col-
lect shorebirds and seabirds around the coast
of South America, a huge job that would take
years to complete. After persuading a muse-
um trustee to help fund the project, Sanford
hired an unusually gifted Californian bird col-
lector named Rollo Beck to see it through. 2

Beck was one of a kind. He only had an
eighth-grade education, but he was hardy,
brilliant, and brave — a “tough little bastard,”
as a friend described him, who could spend
days in a skiff or rowboat alone at sea col-
lecting birds, skinning them, and living off
the meat of their carcasses. He pioneered the
technique of “chumming” for seabirds, toss-

The Becks-adventuresome, childless, and
equally handy with a scalpel and a shotgun —
seemed tailor-made for Sanford’s South
American expedition. With his backing, they
spent the years from 1912 to 1917 circumnav-
igating the coast of the continent, returning
to the United States via the West Indies. The
thousands of specimens they collected sur-
passed the museum’s expectations — Murphy,
who used them as his primary reference for
his landmark Oceanic Birds of South Amer-
ica, gushed that “no other ornithological
collector has carried through a similar cam-
paign, or matched such scientific spoils.” 3

Rollo and Ida, for their part, seemed to have
enjoyed the challenge. A photograph of them
on Christmas Day, 1914, aboard the small sail-
boat Leguri, shows them looking weathered
but sturdy and good-humored as they prepare
“Christmas dinner” among the fjords and is-
lands of southern Chile. They seem
to be sharing a private joke with the
photographer; Ida smiles warmly and
Rollo, wearing an impish expression,
looms like a Cheshire Cat out of the
darkness of the hold to her left. An-
other image from the same day, taken
by Rollo, shows a gracefully posed Ida
reading The Ladies’ Home Journal on
deck with a young gentoo penguin by
her side. Three days later, Ida appears
perched on a cliff, gazing toward the

* It's worth a word, here, about study skins. Birds are unusual among
animals in that their feathers give them their distinctive shapes; unfeathered,
most birds more or less resemble a plucked turkey. So it's possible to pre-
serve the shape and plumage of a freshly-killed bird with a sort of shorthand
field taxidermy. Turning a bird into a 'skin' (which, unless there's a freezer
handy, has to be done within a few hours of its death) involves opening its
abdomen with a vertical incision, removing nearly all of its muscles and
viscera (including the brain, which can be drawn from the skull by gently
turning the neck inside-out), stuffing the body cavity with straw or cotton
batting, and stitching it back up, leaving the beak, feet, wings, tail, and
overall form of the living bird intact. In the hand, these skins have a faintly
talismanic power; they evoke not just the animal they once were, but the
time and place in which they were collected. Rollo and Ida Beck's skills in
preparing these skins in the field were exceptional, and even now, you can
usually spot a Beck skin in a drawer of specimens without looking at the ID
tag. They're clean, artful, and remarkably uniform, and it's hard to imagine
them being prepared at sea, much less in a rowboat.

The Appendix Out Loud

famous silhouette of Cape Horn. It looks like a
good place to be in the second year of the First
World War.

50?

Buoyed by the South American expedition’s suc-
cess, Sanford decided to set his sights on an or-
nithological holy grail. He wanted to send the
Becks on another multi-year collecting trip, this
time to the far-flung islands of the South Pacific.

The Pacific islands were both known and ru-
mored to be the home of many rare and unde-
scribed birds — jewel-like honeyeaters and sun-
birds; the collected-once-and-never-seen-again
Meek’s Pigeon; the leggy, flightless Kagu of New
Caledonia — but Sanford wasn’t only interested
in trophies and bragging rights. Like his friend
Walter Rothschild in England, Sanford wanted a
complete “series” of bird skins from each island,
even where species were duplicated, to create a
picture not only of what birds existed in the world,
but exactly where they were, reflecting a growing
scientific interest in small geographical variations
among related species. Nowhere were these varia-
tions more pronounced than among island birds,
and nowhere were there more islands than in the
Pacific — some twenty to thirty thousand — many
of them never surveyed by ornithologists. San-
ford wasn’t deterred by the fact that these islands
were spread over an area almost as large as all the
world’s land masses combined.

Finding the money for such a wildly ambitious
project, however, was another matter. Sanford

Rollo and Ida Beck on the 1912-1917 Brewster-Sanford
expedition.

AMNH Photos #102034

AMNH Photo #102045 AMNH Photo #102032

July 2013

The France (second ship from right) at anchor in Tarohae bay,
Nukuhiva, Marquesas.

AMNH Photo #108858

Children on Christmas Island.

AMNH Photo #105869

eventually coaxed it from Harry Payne Whitney,
husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (who
later endowed the Whitney Museum of Ameri-
can Art). Whitney contributed $100,000, which
provided for the purchase of a battered-but-stur-
dy schooner, the France, and funded its operation
for five years. The Becks set sail for Fiji in 1920,
launching the Whitney South Seas Expedition-an
unprecedented collecting effort that ultimately
stayed in the field for the next two decades. 4

Life aboard the France was trying. The ship’s en-
gine was unreliable at best, and it was so hot and
cramped in the cabin that everyone usually slept
on deck, where they were often drenched by night
rains. The crew endured dengue fever, malaria
and dysentery, and choked down a monotonous
diet of rice and tinned salmon. They also con-
tended with an infestation of cockroaches and the
smells of what was basically a floating abattoir.
“It was not,” one participant recalled, “a glorious
expedition in any sense of the word.” Added to
all this was the danger of visiting islands whose
residents might not welcome strange foreigners.
En route to a notorious island near New Ireland,
an official of the then-British territorial authority
gave the bird collectors a fifty-fifty chance of mak-
ing it back alive.

Nevertheless, the expedition was an unqualified
success, and the Becks’ casual photographs of the
birds and people of the south seas suggest a world
that was unfamiliar but not unfriendly. After five
years, the France hadn’t even left the many islands
of Fiji, but the Becks’ steady pace and remarkable
skill resulted in a comprehensive collection, en-
abling Sanford to secure continued funding from
the Whitneys. (The Becks, possibly out of exasper-
ation with the Ivy League boys the museum kept
sending them as field assistants, left the expedi-
tion after nine years and traveled on their own to
Australia and New Guinea, where Rollo discov-
ered a new species of bowerbird.)*

Conversation with Mary LeCroy, May 2013. LeCroy, who
still has an office in the Department of Ornithology, is the
museum's closest remaining link to the Whitney expeditions.
She was hired as an assistant to curator Thomas Gilliard, who
participated in expeditions that collected material for the Hall
of Oceanic Birds, including the New Guinea and Philippines
dioramas.

The Appendix Out Loud

In 1929, Sanford went back to the Whitneys again,
not only for more money for the South Seas Ex-
pedition, but with something even grander and
pricier in mind. Birds were pouring into the De-
partment of Ornithology from the Pacific and
from separate expeditions to the interiors of Af-
rica and South America, and a new facility was
urgently needed to keep the specimens safe from
fire, rot, and vermin. Sanford asked the Whitneys
to fund the construction of an entire new wing of
the museum, purpose-built to house and display
its overflowing bird collection. The wing would
also include two permanent exhibit halls, one of
which would showcase the birds of the Whitney
expedition and their home islands, bringing the
distant worlds of the Pacific — previously known
best to the public from the works of Gauguin and
Melville — to Manhattan.*

The Whitneys, once again, capitulated. They gave
an enormous sum of stock to the project, the city
provided matching funds, and the museum broke
ground on the Whitney Wing in 1931. The South
Seas Expedition, having expanded its geographi-
cal scope as far as New Zealand and the Marian-
as, now added a new dimension to its mission: to
bring back not only island birds, but the islands
themselves. 5

Frank Chapman was ahead of his time in his belief
that museum displays should present animals in
the context of their habitats, and insisted that di-
oramas should depict actual places, not idealized
composites. To prepare for the construction of an
exhibit hall devoted to Pacific birds, the museum
hired plant collectors and photographers for fore-
ground material and visual artists charged with
absorbing the colors, textures, and moods of the
Pacific islands for the backgrounds of the Whitney
hall’s exhibits. 6

Rollo Beck photographing a blue-faced booby on its nest
on Christmas Island.

AMNH Photo #106524

Photographing a red-footed booby on its nest
on Christmas Island.

AMNH Photo #105896

*Shortly after construction began on the Whitney Wing, the museum received a dramat-
ic windfall in the form of a letter to Sanford from Walter Rothschild, offering to sell his
globally representative collection of 280,000 bird skins to the American Museum. The sale
was made, with funds provided (again) by the Whitneys. At the time, Sanford was led to
believe that Rothschild had sold his collection for tax reasons, but Rothschild's niece Miriam
revealed in a 1 983 biography of her uncle that the cause of the sale was blackmail:
Rothschild's former mistress, a "charming, witty, aristocratic, ruthless" woman, "who, aided
and abetted by her husband ... ruined him financially, destroyed his piece of mind for forty
years and eventually forced him to sell his bird collection." Miriam Rothschild, Dear Lord
Rothschild: birds, butterflies, and history [ London: Hutchinson, 1983).

July 2013

AMNH Photo #326159

Francis Lee Jaques, a gifted painter of birds in
flight who conceived the eighteen-window design
of the hall, accompanied the Whitney expedition
to eastern Polynesia and in 1936 was selected for
the career-defining job of painting all of the hall’s
dioramas. In hiring a single artist for this massive
endeavor, Chapman and Sanford hoped to pro-
duce a feeling of unity and coherence among the
disparate landscapes. 7

Jaques’ career wasn’t the only one shaped by the
expedition. Among its alumni was an energetic
young German ornithologist named Ernst Mayr,
who left an isolated field camp in New Guinea to
join the crew of the France in 1930. In 1931, Mayr
accepted a post at the museum, where he began
the mammoth job of describing and analyzing its
growing backlog of bird skins. Many of the speci-
mens were new to science, and Mayr drew on the
incredible breadth of the expedition’s collection

and his own field experiences as the basis for his
still-definitive list of the birds of New Guinea and
his landmark Systematics and the Origin of Spe-
cies (1942), which essentially created the modern
field of evolutionary biology.

It’s probably fair to say that the birds collected
by the Whitney expedition were as significant for
Mayr, and for science itself, as the birds of the
Galapagos were for Darwin. As the Hall of Oce-
anic Birds took shape, Mayr must have seen it as a
monument to a part of the world to which he owed
a great debt. It probably pleased him when Mur-
phy’s staff installed a medallion-shaped display
of the outlandishly decorated New Guinean crow
relatives dearest to Mayr’s heart, the birds of par-
adise, facing visitors as they entered the Whitney
hall.

The Appendix Out Loud

Thirty-two years elapsed between the launch
of the France and the final stroke of Jaques’
brush on the dioramas of the Hall of Oce-
anic Birds, which now contained mounted
specimens of more than 400 species, some of
which could be seen nowhere else outside of
their home islands, and several of which had
rarely been seen at all.

It was 1952. The South Seas Expedition had
continued under different leaders until the
outbreak of World War II, when many of the
islands visited by the bird collectors became
scenes of heavy fighting. The war delayed
work on the hall itself for several years, but it
also gave the far reaches of the Pacific an im-
mediacy and interest for Americans that San-
ford couldn’t have anticipated in 1920. Jaques
had already officially retired, and Mayr, who
would become one of the most revered biol-
ogists of the twentieth century, would soon
move on to a new position at Harvard. Leon-
ard Sanford, Frank Chapman, Rollo Beck,
and Harry Payne Whitney had died.*

But their vision was realized. From the center
of the hall, visitors were surrounded by a uni-
fied, 360-degree panorama with a consistent
horizon that embraced every Pacific land-
scape, from coral atolls to volcanic peaks,
from the high seas to sub-Antarctic forests.
In the domed ceiling above, painted like the
sky, soared delicate snow petrels, giant alba-
trosses, and blade-winged tropical frigate-
birds. At the hall’s dedication in January 1953,
Whitney’s son Cornelius declared:

*Ernst Mayr, who had supervised the design and construction of
the now-dismantled Sanford Hall of Bird Life at AMNH, remained at
Harvard until his death in 2005 at the age of 1 00. I visited his office
at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology shortly before he died;
it was flanked by two sections of tree trunks that contained nest cavities
excavated, respectively, by Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers ( Campephilus
principalis ) and Imperial Woodpeckers ( Campephilus imperialis). Both
species-huge, beautiful birds with bold markings and trumpeting calls—
were alive when Mayr was born, and extinct by the time of his death.

Here tonight we may all feel privileged to
observe a dream come true. ..there is sweat,
toil, and tears represented here. There is
success and failure. There is devotion to sci-
ence, loyalty to friends, and high romance.
There is a past, a present, and a future.
There is a corner of knowledge added to the
mysteries of the universe in which we live.
There is a thing of beauty, and so, of truth.*

fThe dome of the Whitney hall was the only project on which Francis
Lee Jaques and James Perry Wilson (the museum's most famous painter
of dioramas, including most of the African and North American Mam-
mal halls) ever collaborated.

July 2013

The Galapagos diorama of the Whitney Hall
as it appeared in 1953.

AMNH #315935

The New Zealand diorama, one of the few still visible today.

AMNH #322577

A child inspects the Snow Mountains of New Guinea.

AMNH #326158

The Little Diomede diorama.

AMNH #313007

The Great Barrier Reef diorama.

AMNH #318616

The Appendix Out Loud

Peter Capainolo in his office.

Branan Edgens

“It was incredible,” said Peter Capainolo, scien-
tific assistant for ornithology at the museum,
closing the brass gate of the Whitney Wing’s orig-
inal freight elevator. “It was like you were there.”
Capainolo, balding and soft-spoken with a gray
mustache and a convivial Long Island accent, has
worked in the department for over a decade and is
especially fond of birds of prey. A very convincing
golden eagle, rescued from an eddy of the collec-
tion, perches on a filing cabinet in his office.

He pulled a lever, and the elevator descended from
the offices of the Department of Ornithology to
the basement of the Whitney Wing, past the halls
built to contain and showcase the museum’s vast
bird holdings, which long ago left Harvard’s in the
dust. New acquisitions have slowed to a trickle,
but the wing now holds nearly a million speci-
mens — skins, skeletons, and whole birds in for-
malin gathered from every part of the living world
at immense cost and effort over many decades.

Most of them remain stored in metal cabinets, laid
side by side in long trays. Capainolo led the way
into the lab where study skins are still occasionally
prepared; a female turkey he’d shot upstate a few
days earlier was pinned out to dry on a table. The
turkey was one of about 250 skins Capainolo has
contributed to the collection over the course of
his career. Rollo Beck, at the museum’s last count,
supplied at least 44,000.*

Two floors up, the elevator’s doors opened to ad-
mit a blast of warm, humid air pumped from the
butterfly exhibit’s ventilation system. Capainolo
smiled at a surprised guard resting in a folding
chair and opened a door into the corner office of
Ben King, the museum’s partly-retired expert on
Southeast Asian birds. King wasn’t in. The office
was like a time capsule from an earlier age of the
museum, spacious but cluttered, piled with books,
maps, bones, every volume of the immense Hand-
book of Birds of the World, and, against one wall, a
Victorian-era collection of miscellaneous North
American birds in a dusty glass case.

The birds in the case were arranged like flowers
on a stylized tangle of branches and vines. It was
an undeniably beautiful object, but more whimsy
than science, and Capainolo noted the presence of

*The turkey, which Capainolo had nicknamed "Mrs. Beasley"
had been in at the height of its breeding cycle; an index card
pinned next to the skin noted "no molt; heavy fat; ovary huge
- 4 large ova, 3 collapsed follicles, 1 egg in cloaca, ready to
lay." I asked him about the egg. "I ate it," he replied. "It was
fresh."

a European starling - a recent introduction to the
continent at the time the case was built. “That’s
how they used to do it,” he said. “Lots of pretty
birds.” He opened another small door in the far
wall of the office and stepped through it into a
dim, narrow, high-ceilinged passage that ran the
length of the Whitney hall.

Inside the passage, nine metal-ribbed half-silos
stretched from floor to ceiling, like columns of
a massive temple: these were the curved backs
of the hidden dioramas, sealed in the dark for
the past fifteen years. To preserve the illusion of
their seamless backgrounds, there were no secret
doors; access was only through the glass in front,
covered over now with plywood. Hidden inside
were the landscapes and birds of Fiji, Papua, the
snowy peaks of western New Guinea, wind-blast-

ed Little Diomede (a tiny spot of land in the Ber-
ing Sea), and the shores of the Great Barrier Reef.
Piles of cardboard boxes choked the corridor, an
antique Underwood typewriter rested against the
wall, and a decades-old can of Schaefer beer was
tucked behind a railing. Capainolo nodded toward
a ladder that ascended into darkness near the
doorway. “There’s a little platform up there that’d
be a good place to take a nap,” he said. “You go up
there, nobody’ll find you.”

On a recent afternoon in the Butterfly Conserva-
tory, a museum volunteer armed with a spray bot-
tle misted the branches of potted Norfolk Island
pines, and a family from Pittsburgh admired a trio
of resting monarchs. These butterflies, explained
the guide, were imported as pupae from farms
where they were specially raised for exhibits like
this one. They’re also the stars, he added, of the
film on butterfly migration showing downstairs
in the IMAX theatre. The monarchs, their folded
underwings the pale brown of dead leaves, were
North American, but their cellmates were cosmo-
politan: bouncing against the lights or uncurling
their tongues to drink condensation from the
walls, they hailed from the Amazon, East Afri-
ca, Malaysia. Rows of unhatched chrysalides in a
narrow glass box bulged and twitched, and a tow-
headed little girl contemplated a female swallow-
tail flopping in a plate of orange slices, its wings
grown ragged in the final hours of its few weeks
of life.

The Butterfly Conservatory, sponsored by Lord
& Taylor, was installed in 1998 as a temporary ex-
hibit — the Whitney hall had been meticulously
cleaned, and its signage updated — but the but-
terflies’ popularity has endured. Visitors paying
a special exhibition fee are allowed in every half
hour, and on most days between October and June
a steady stream of people files out of the conser-
vatory’s double doors past four of the still-visible
dioramas of the Hall of Oceanic Birds: tropical Sa-
moa, the wild seas of the high southern latitudes,
the Snares Islands, and New Zealand. Though the
most colorful birds are slightly faded after sixty
years on display, the scenes remain remarkably
fresh and real: Samoa’s lorikeets, honey-eaters
and fruit-doves blithely perch in view of a con-

cealed barn owl, the yellow-crested penguins of
the Snares nest in a weird forest of tree daisies,
and elegant, wave-hugging cape petrels and pri-
ons soar over the bow of the France. 8

New Zealand, however, stands out from the oth-
ers, as its centerpiece is an elaborate fake. Dom-
inating the scene is a model of a moa, an os-
trich-sized grazing bird which no one has seen
alive for centuries. It was probably an irresistible
temptation to include it for Murphy, who spent
time digging up sub-fossil moa bones on New
Zealand’s South Island, but it’s an odd moment of
scientific nostalgia in a hall so dedicated to pre-
serving the Pacific as it was in the early twentieth
century that a bullet-pierced American soldier’s
helmet lies in the foreground of the Philippines
diorama. 9

The moa, with its long, curved neck, shaggy feath-
ers, massive feet, and golden eyes, peers out at the
viewer from a remote beach among the fjords of
the South Island, surrounded by a host of strange
birds that are now extremely rare — an enormous,
flightless parrot, a crow-like bird with odd blue
wattles, a purple-and-green moorhen with a huge
red beak. The scene is rendered so lovingly and be-
lievably that it elicits a pang of regret, as it seems
meant to, that this version of the world is gone,
that these giants no longer walk among us. 10

A sign by the exit reads: “The Whitney Hall of Oce-
anic Birds is temporarily closed. We apologize for
the inconvenience.”

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Michael
Walker, Peter Capainolo, Mary LeCroy, Paul
Sweet, and Barbara Mathe of the American Mu-
seum of Natural History in New York for being so
generous with their time and attention, and for
granting me “backstage” access to the Whitney
hall and its archives. I would also like to thank
Branan Edgens for his photographs, and Robin
Woods for pointing me toward the remarkable
life stories of Rollo and Ida Beck.

The Appendix Out Loud

Notes

OMUL O I THE MAYOR. CITY OF NEW YORK

THE WHITNEY WING FOR BIRDS AT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
IS CELEBRATING ITS FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR. ITS EXHIBITION
AND RESEARCH FACILITIES HAVE ENABLED THE MUSEUM TO BECOME A WORLD
RENOWNED CENTER FOR ORNITHOLOGICAL RESEARCH. THE SPECIMENS HOUSED IN
THIS BUILDING ARE AN IRREPLACEABLE RESOURCE AS WE SEEK TO UNDERSTAND
THE DIVERSITY OF BIRDS AND HOW WE MIGHT PROTECT THEM IN A WORLD
PLAGUED BY THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR HABITATS.

THF MAGNIFICENT GIFT OF THE WHITNEY WING TO THE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK
WAS MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF THE WHITNEY FAMILY, THF
SANFORD FAMILY, THE CITY OF NEW YORK, AND NUMEROUS OTHERS. THE
WING'S PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS - THE WHITNEY HALL OF OCEANIC BIRDS AND THE
SANFORD HALL OF BIOLOGY OF BIRDS - HAVE ENLIGHTENED MILLIONS OF
STUDLNTS, SCHOLARS, AND VISITORS FROM AROUND THE WORE 0 AND WILL
CONTINUE TO BE SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE AND ENJOYMENT FOR GENERATIONS TO
COME.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, EDWARD I. KOCH, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, DO
HEREBY PROCLAIM OCTOBER 18, 1989, TO BE

Mayor Ed Koch's declaration.

Jonathan Meiburg

2. Once, during after-dinner coffee at the Universi-
ty Club, an inebriated donor sidled around a mar-
ble column and warned a bemused Murphy not
to “give the old rascal a cent more than $25,000.”
Mary LeCroy, “Ernst Mayr at the American Muse-
um of Natural History,’ Ornithological Monographs p.
33-

Scenes from the visible Whitney hall dioramas today.

Branan Edgens

Jonathan Meiburg

Tag from a female kelp goose, prepared in the
Falkland Islands by Rollo Beck in 1916.

Jonathan Meiburg

4. Rollo and Ida were occasionally separated
during the Whitney expedition. Dumbacher &
West (2010) write that “By all accounts, Ida was as
tough as nails. She suffered terribly from seasick-
ness, and like Darwin, she never really got over it,
yet this did not prevent her from traveling. Photos
typically show Ida in nice dresses and shoes not
typical of field attire.” They also write that “she
was good-natured, quick to laugh, and she adored
Rollo.”

July 2013

5. Luckily for the museum, the Whitneys’ gift of
stock was swiftly liquidated by the museum’s
comptroller before the 1929 stock market crash.

6 .

GROUPS COMPLETED

* JOB NUMBERS ARE THOSE OF PREPARATION ONLY •

Progress on the Whitney hall by 1 940.

AMNH Library Services

7. Stephen Quinn, the Museum’s Senior Project
Manager for Exhibitions, writes that “Jaques, with
no formal art or science training, was nothing less
than a genius... to this day no artist is thought to
paint birds in flight as well as Jaques.”

Jaques constructed an ingenious scale model of the
hall for use in planning and mocking up the displays
from a visitor's eye level.

AMNH Photo #3 14355

Robert Cushman Murphy, at the official dedication of
the Whitney Hall in 1953, talking to Eleanor Searle,
aka Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.

AMNH Library Services

10. This bird, the flightless takahe Porphyrio hoch-
stetteri, the largest living member of the rail family,
was thought to be extinct until 20 November 1948,
when a small population was discovered in the re-
mote Murchison Mountains of southwestern New
Zealand. Only 263 individuals remain as of 2013.
Like the moa, the takahe in the Whitney hall is a
model.

8. According to Peter Capainolo, during the clean-
ing of the Whitney hall’s dome, a conservator
working on scaffolding looked down, spotted ac-
tor Bill Murray looking at the dioramas, and called
down, “I loved you in Ghostbusters!”, to which
Murray replied, “I loved you in The Agony and the
Ecstasy!”

The Appendix Out Loud

"Sustained Anger," "Explosive Anger," "Greed," and "Fear," by the synesthetic artist Annie Besant, 1901 .

Wikimedia Commons

a'V' >->

2'i

Controlling Sound:
Musical Torture from the Shoah to
Guantanamo

Melissa Kagen

“Purely physical torture is losing importance,”
observed the psychologist Gustav Keller in 1981.
“Psychological and psychiatric findings and meth-
ods are taking its place, planned and sometimes
administered by white-collar torturers.” This
statement, though prescient, is debatable: plen-
ty of purely physical torture has been reported by
former prisoners of Guantanamo and Bagram.
The implication, however, is one of progress: that
torture has been civilized, professionalized, in
some way stripped of its teeth.

After the news broke that American soldiers
were torturing detainees in secret prisons like
Guantanamo, the idea spread that so-called “no
touch” torture is more humane than more con-
ventional methods involving violence to the body.
No-touch torture utilizes methods like sleep
deprivation, temperature regulation, violation of
cultural and religious taboos, the playing of loud
music, and psychological manipulation while in-
terrogating prisoners. These methods, though of-
ten brutal, frequently don’t leave physical marks,
thus nebulizing the concept of torture and leaving
the act more open to interpretation.

July 2013

Music torture at Guantanamo is a prime example
of this mindset. Endless news cycles discussed
whether waterboarding, hooding, and playing
loud music could even be considered torture. Mu-
sicians, when asked for comment about “music
torture”, sometimes responded dismissively: Me-
tallica’s James Hetfield replied to the news with
the comment, “We’ve been punishing our par-
ents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for
ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” Bob
Singleton, who composed the often-used Barney
the Purple Dinosaur theme song, wrote in the Los
Angeles Times, “Would it annoy them? Perhaps ...
But could it ‘break’ the mental state of an adult? If
so, that would say more about their mental state
than about the music.”

The implication that these torture methods are
somehow softer or easier to withstand than tra-
ditional methods is an interesting but dangerous
fallacy. In no-touch torture, the torture weapon is
the prisoner’s own body, which aches in stress po-
sitions, shivers, sweats, and demands sleep. The
body itself becomes the enemy, psychologically
destroying the prisoner from the inside out.*

During war-crime trials, the torture weapon is
often used as a synecdoche for the torture itself:
a hammer, thumbscrew, or bathtub presented as
evidence manifest the experience of that torture
in an object. But with no-touch torture, where the
weapon is the prisoner’s body, no such object ex-
ists to display as a remnant of the event. In the ab-
sence of a clearly identifiable torture weapon, the
torture practiced on a prisoner becomes nearly in-
visible to outsiders, and the room itself becomes
toxic for the victim.*

As a physical torture, music is rarely used by it-
self; instead, it’s a component of the toxic envi-
ronment. By blasting music, blaring lights, and
keeping a cell ice cold, a prisoner is prevented
from sleeping, and this deprivation is the ostensi-
ble goal. After enough of this treatment, prisoners

*No-touch torture is what Scarry might as well be describing
when she writes that "this unseen sense of self-betrayal in pain ...
is objectified in forced exercises that make the prisoner's body an
active agent, an actual cause of pain." Elaine Scarry, The Body In
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), p. 38.

are apparently easier to interrogate. As Sergeant
Mark Hadsell of the 361st PsyOps Company in Iraq
explained in 2003,

These people haven’t heard heavy metal. They
can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain
and body functions start to slide, your train of
thought slows down and your will is broken.

That’s when we come in and talk to them.

Beyond its psychological power, music’s phys-
ical properties also mean that it can be used as
a weapon by itself. The US has used LRADs and
infrasonic weapons, causing reports of blown
out eardrums, dizziness, ringing, and temporary
deafness. ‘Safe’ levels of sound are articulated in
scientific language.

In Guantanamo, music’s physical and psycholog-
ical properties interrelate. Not only does the mu-
sic cause headaches and sound like loud, painful
banging, its aesthetic qualities demand an innate
human reaction. When we listen to music repeat-
edly, it inscribes itself in our brains (think of ‘get-
ting a tune stuck in your head’ or a German ‘Ohr-
wurm’).

Musicologist Christian Grimy writes about a for-
mer prisoner of Guantanamo who was tortured
with David Grey’s “Babylon,” a soft rock ballad
seemingly chosen for the geographical coinci-
dence (Babylon as a location in the Middle East).

Years after his torture, when Grimy played a part
of the song for him, he immediately burst into
sobs. Suzanne Cusick describes how music’s cul-
tural connotations come to symbolize the military
power of the torturer. Because of music’s ability to
get inside its listener, musical torture represents
“the overwhelmingly diffuse Power that is outside
one, but also is inside, and that operates by forc-
ing one to comply against one’s will, against one’s

t "The torture room," according to Elaine Scarry, "is not just the
setting in which the torture occurs. ..it is itself literally converted
into another weapon, into an agent of pain. All aspects of the
basic structure— walls, ceiling, windows, doors— undergo this
conversion." By turning the environment itself into a weapon,
torture unmakes the world, undoes its normal referents. Part of this
process requires the "mutilation of the domestic," the perversion of
quotidian objects— chair, light, bed, or music — into torture weap-
ons. Elain Scarry, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of
the World, pp. 40, 45.

The Appendix Out Loud

interests, because there is no way, not even a
retreat into interiority — to escape the pain.”

How do interrogators choose the soundtracks
of musical torture? During the siege of Fal-
lujah in November 2004, the 361st PsyOps
company bombed the city with Metallica. As
PsyOps spokesman Ben Abel explained at the
time:

It’s not the music so much as the sound. It’s
like throwing a smoke bomb. The aim is to
disorient and confuse the enemy to gain a
tactical advantage ... our guys have been
getting really creative in finding sounds they
think would make the enemy upset ...These
guys have their own mini-disc players, with
their own music, plus hundreds of down-
loaded sounds. It’s kind of personal prefer-
ence how they choose the songs. We’ve got
very young guys making these decisions.

During the siege of Fallujah, mullahs re-
sponded to American rap with “loudspeakers
hooked to generators, trying to drown out
Eminem with prayers, chants of Allahu Ak-
bar, and Arabic music.” 1

In the course of my doctoral research, I’ve had
the chance to reflect on the parallels between
these news stories and the long history of
musical torture. The other half of my project
involves mapping some of the music heard in
the infamous Nazi concentration camp Aus-
chwitz. In some ways, the projects are so dif-
ferent as to seem unconnected: music played

at Auschwitz was part of an overall culture of
terror and control, but not a torture in itself.

However, the same idea, that musical space
is a metaphor for control, can be seen all
over the camp. A particularly clear example
can be heard in the hospital barracks at Aus-
chwitz-Birkenau.

Szymon Laks, a survivor who was forced to
play in the camp orchestra, describes how his
ensemble was sent to the barracks on Christ-
mas of 1943 to console the sick with carols,
specifically “Stifle Nacht” (“Silent Night”):

After a few bars quiet weeping began to be
heard from all sides, which became louder
as we played and finally burst out in general
uncontrolled sobbing. I didn’t know what to
do. To play on? Louder? From all sides, spas-
modic cries began to roll in on me. ‘Enough
of this! Stop! Clear out! Let us die in peace!’

Laks, though a prisoner himself, appears
here as a representative of Nazi power, sim-
ply because he’s playing Christmas carols to
dying (largely lewish) inmates.

Laks, though a prisoner himself, appears here
as a representative of Nazi power, simply be-
cause he’s playing Christmas carols to dying
(largely Jewish) inmates.

The prisoners wished to die in peace — which
is to say, they wanted the barest hint of auton-
omy over the space in which they die. This
music, to which they are forced to listen, dis-
turbs them not only because it disrupts that

Listen to "Stifle Nacht" (Silent Night) at http://appendic.es/rn/10

=r fl'iIffflOO‘DD

“00000000

=OOOODO
= 00 D
= D0D
= 000

A map of the sonic
environment at the Aus-
chwitz-Birkenau camp
in 1943.

Melissa Kagen and Jake
Melrose, 2012

July 2013

space, but because it invades their bodies. A piece
played inside a brick barrack would be audible
on the path outside, and the march played next
to the path would be audible to anyone within.
Moreover, there is a limited distinction between
sounds heard by guards and sounds heard by pris-
oners — a difference in psychological affect, cer-
tainly, but not in the music itself.

In other words, the sounds heard by guards and
prisoners were often the same and, in this strange
sense, prisoners and guards were and are united
in their experience. In the case of musical torture
during the war on terror, this sharing was, at least
in one instance, more radical. Jonathan Pieslak
records the following quote from U.S. soldier C.J.
Grisham, who used music during interrogations
in Iraq:

As long as they were listening to babies crying,

I had to listen to babies crying ...You are not al-
lowed to do anything to the enemy, by law, that
you wouldn’t do yourself. So if I’m getting eight
hours of sleep, the people I’m interrogating have
to get eight hours of sleep, if I’m only getting
two hours of sleep, then my prisoners are only
required to get two hours of sleep. We can’t treat
them any worse than we treat ourselves.

This inference of shared experience through music
is reminiscent of the musical warfare at the Siege
of Fallujah, where opposing soundtracks compet-
ed for control of the city in a sonic analogue to the
battle. It also articulates the sonic hegemony I’m
investigating: how sound equalizes all ears, while
still demonstrating an unequal power relation.

Grisham’s description of this army guideline,
requiring a certain equality between prisoners
and guards, provides an interesting inversion of
a traditional understanding of torture. For Scar-
ry, torture’s premise is the utter gulf between a
person being tortured, who experiences the pain
as world-destroying, and a person not being tor-
tured, who doubts the existence of that pain be-
cause of its utter unsharability. The boundaries
between torturer and victim blur — not in their
power relations, but in the similarity of their expe-
rienced environment.

That shared environment is part of what I find so
interesting about music in Auschwitz, and it is a
feature of the camps that I have tried to visualize

in my work. My partner Jake Melrose and I mapped
forced music (which prisoners were required to
play) in red, and voluntary music in blue. Perfor-
mance allowed for a modicum of creative expres-
sion, an outlet not readily available for manual
laborers. For example, after a rehearsal in Block
24 of Auschwitz I (the Main Camp), a Hungarian
pianist played Chopin’s Funeral March (Piano Sonata
#2 in B-jlat minor), saying it was the only appropri-
ate music considering the circumstances. This
same Block 24, however, transformed into a per-
verse jazz club when SS officers came to unwind
after a long day. They would ask musicians to play
prohibited American jazz and ragtime songs like
“Dinah,” “Sweet Sue,” “I Can’t Give You Anything
but Love,” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Listen to Alexander's Ragtime Band at
http://appendic.es/rn/! 1

Listen to Chopin's Piano Sonata in B Flat Minor, Op. 35,
"Funeral March" at http://appendic.es/rn/12

Listen to Julius Fucik's "Florentiner Marsch" at
http://appendic.eS/m/l 3

Directly outside Block 24 was the area through
which work gangs marched into and out of the
gates, accompanied by various marches like
Fucik’s “Florentiner Marsch,” Liebling’s “Wenn
Ich Traurig Bin,” and the “Horst Wessel Lied.”
Obviously, this area could become a very different
musical environment at different times of the day.
By having the freedom to choose the music they
wanted to hear, the guards made their authority
clear and their control absolute. Moments of mu-
sical mourning, like the pianist playing Chopin,
had to be squeezed in when no one was listening.

Music played in Guantanamo is similarly varied.
The most confusing category to me is emotional,
nostalgic music: Fleetwood Mac, Matchbox 20,
Chris Christopherson, David Grey’s “Babylon”
as well as children’s songs — notably the themes
from Sesame Street and Barney the Purple Dino-
saur. To me, this bespeaks a strange nostalgia for
a specifically American childhood, even as those
American children have grown up to inherit a
world that is nothing like what they anticipated
while watching Sesame Street.

The Appendix Out Loud

“American Pie,” another song in this category,
similarly invokes nostalgia for a lost past, in ad-
dition to carrying a religious implication — one
verse reads, “the three men I admired most, the
father, son, and holy ghost, they caught the last
train to the coast, the day the music died” — in a
kind of requiem for a nation that’s strayed from
its God. The emotional thrust of this piece would
hit American soldiers much harder than prisoners
less familiar with Americana. This is a particu-
larly American kind of abuse: aggressive exertion
of cultural hegemony mixed with physical force,
ostensible compliance with the “good guy” rules,
and nostalgia for the lost American dream.

Notes

i. I haven’t clarified how music in torture differs
from music in wartime. I have been treating them
similarly here, since several of the same principles
are at play: using music to exert cultural hegemo-
ny, playing it to emphasize control over space,
physically assaulting the enemy with soundwaves.
One major difference is, of course, that musical
torture takes place in a small, circumscribed place
and is completely inescapable, whereas music in
wartime forms only one aspect of a nightmarish
landscape. Music in Auschwitz was therefore used
more as a wartime weapon than a torture device.

My project began as an attempt to think about
music in space. How does music work to control
space, and how can it affect bodies inhabiting that
space? What does an environment that has been
saturated with an enemy culture’s music sound
like, and is the music functioning as anything be-
yond cultural aggression?

But one of the most interesting aspects for me,
beyond those initial questions, has been the re-
sponses. The first comment from almost every-
one who hears about my project is either a joke or
a respectful “hmm,” depending on which case I
begin with. If I start to describe music torture in
Guantanamo, the comment will usually be a quip
about what musical genre or artist they would
consider torturous: country music, Yoko Ono,
Justin Bieber, insert-hated-group-here. If I begin
by describing the Auschwitz maps, the comment
is something quiet, curious and respectful. It
seems like firsthand evidence of the way we differ-
entiate history from current events, and American
behavior from everyone else’s.

And this American exceptionalism can prevent
us from hearing crucial voices coming out of
Guantanamo now. An op-ed in The New York Times
on Sunday, April 14, 2013 by Samir Naji al Hasan
Moqbel reported on a hunger strike in Guantana-
mo. It ended with the plea, “I just hope that be-
cause of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the
world will once again look to Guantanamo before
it is too late.”

July 2013

Biophony and the
Deep History of Sound

Bernie Krause

A man of man y talents, Bernie Krause got his start as a
musician in the early 1960s, playing with The Weauers
and appearing as an occasional backup session musician
on early Motown recordings. He was a pioneer of electron-
ic music, studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen and intro-
ducing — with his late music partner, Paul Beaver — the
Moog synthesizer to The Doors, the Byrds, Stevie Wonder,
and George Harrison, among many others. In the 1970s,
Krause and Beauer released their own charted series of in-
novative synthesizer recordings and began to incorporate
jield recordings of natural soundscapes into their composi-
tions — whatKrause calls ‘biophony.’

Today, Krause produces highly sophisticated recordings of
ecosystems around the world. He has been hailed as “one of
the world’s leading experts in natural sound” by Sir George
Martin, and Jane Goodall writes that he “speaks to us of
an ancient music to which so many of us are deaf.” His
Wild Sanctuary Audio Archiue features recordings of more
than 15,000 species and 4,500 hours of marine and ter-
restrial habitats, including recordings of biomes that haoe
since been destroyed by human activity.

For The Appendix’s third issue, we focused primarily on
human-made sounds. But Krause offers an important re-
minder that man-made noise (anthrophony) is only one
component of the earth’s soundscape. In his book The
Great Animal Orchestra, he argues that the earliest
music and speech was inspired by early humans’ encoun-
ter with animal uocalizations and other sounds from the
natural world.

Krause is also a remarkably vivid writer. His descriptions
of biophonies evoke the mysterious beauty of natural
soundscapes that long predated humans, and may well
outlast us. In the audio excerpt and transcription below, he
recounts a meeting with a hungry jaguar, its growls picked
up by the hyper-sensitiue recording equipment Krause em-
ploys in his field recordings.

“I don’t especially refer to that or similar situations as
‘close calls,”’ Krause told us. “They were just within the
range of expected encounters one anticipates when fully
engaged with the natural world.”- The Editors

The Appendix Out Loud

Listen to a recording, transcribed below, of Krause's encounter with a jaguar at
http://appendic.es/ m/k

Transcript:

Recording late one night deep in the Amazon
jungle, my colleague Ruth Happel and I were
alone in the forest several kilometers from
camp with no light apart from the beams of
our flashlights. Hoping to record the night
ambience at several locations, we walked the
trail quite aware of the tapestry of sounds
around us. Along the way, we also picked up
the unmistakable marking scent of a nearby
jaguar. We never saw or heard the animal,
but we knew it was close, perhaps even just a
few feet away; it was frequently scent-mark-
ing as it followed us.

The musky feline odor was a constant
presence. Our senses were heightened, but
neither of us was afraid or perceived any
immediate danger. Sitting quietly about
fifty meters apart, we recorded the acoustic
texture of the nighttime rain forest — the del-
icate admixture of raindrops on leaves, and
insects, birds, frogs, and mammals perform-
ing their unified chorus as they have each day
and night since the beginning.

After about an hour, we packed our gear and
hiked deeper into the forest, listening for
recording sites with more varied combina-
tions. Then, around midnight, we decided
to split up in order to gather the even greater
variety of night sounds we hoped to encoun-
ter in this wonderfully rich environment.
Ruth went down the path in one direction,
and I went off in another.

After trekking for about fifteen minutes, I sat
down beside the trail and began to record the
intense tropical choruses of frogs, insects,
and reptiles. Only then did I hear the cat’s
low growl in my headphones. It must have
singled me out and followed me. Because I
had the headphones’ volume turned up to
catch the fragile acoustic composition and
detail of the forest, I wasn’t attuned to my

unlikely visitor — or aware that it had come
that close. The sudden register of the jag-
uar’s growls in my headset indicated that the
cat was not more than an arm’s length from
the mics I had set up about thirty feet down
the trail.

Fully alert in an instant, a rush of adrenaline
catching me off guard, I felt my chest con-
vulse. Trying to think of an exit strategy —
there was none — I made some effort to calm
down. In the moment, I thought that the
sound of my heart was so audible, it would
startle the animal. But I kept absolutely still,
holding my breath in the darkness.

The incident lasted no more than a minute,
but it seemed like a couple of hours as I sat
mesmerized by the power of the animal’s
voice, its breathing, and the sounds of rum-
bles in its stomach. Then, as suddenly as it
appeared, the jaguar moved silently off into
the forest, leaving behind rhythmic waves of
frog and whirring insect choruses, and what
remained of my pounding heart.

In April 2013, we corresponded with Krause about the
encounter, his work, and how the sounds of nature
might interact with human culture and history.

That jaguar recording is remarkable. Haue you had
any other brushes with dangerous creatures?

Others include intruding in polar bear terri-
tory and getting in between two mountain
gorillas having a dispute.

Your book/eatures a fascinating transcription of the
birdsong of the musician wren into musical nota-
tion, which follows the pentatonic scale. What oth-
er animal sounds haue you transcribed in this way?

Among them — aside from several species of
birds — there are amphibians, insects, hump-

July 2013

back whales, killer whales, some species of dol-
phins, and bats.

Can you speak about music as a cultural middle ground
in the different places you’ue traueled to — but also per-
haps about its role as a signifier of difference as well?
Elsewhere in this issue, /or instance, Glenda Goodman
writes about the differences betioeen Puritan and Algon-
quian Indian singing styles and the conflicts this caused.
Can sound be a point 0/ contention as well as something
that unites us?

This is an area that deserves much more attention
and study. My gut response is that music has al-
ways been a result and indicator of — originally, at
least — both our connection to the natural world
and its biophony and geophony which we’ve ele-
gantly mimicked. Either that, or it has become a
solipsistic reflection of our own need to control
sound and, in the process, thinking that we could
transform it to ‘improve on nature,’ we’ve become
immersed in the illusion that we can do much bet-
ter, with compositions that suggest a radical and
detached departure from natural world experi-
ence. In the case of religious music, for example,
natural soundscapes are thought of as evil in some
quarters. (I like to think of biophonies and some
geophonies as the true voice of the divine and the
way the gods speak to us directly about the state of
our own existence... such as it is.)

In your book you cite the music of the Ba’Aka 0/ south-
western Africa as suggestive of an ancestral linkage be-
tween human music and natural soundscapes, but are
also careful to remind us that the Ba’Aka are a lining
culture and that their music remains fluid. To what de-
gree do you think distinct traditions of music and sound
might remain embedded in a culture for centuries or mil-
lenia? How does one make deductions about ancient mu-
sic based on contemporary societies?

These are deep questions that go way beyond my
level of experience and knowledge. I am not a mu-
sical anthropologist and cannot begin to extrapo-
late indigenous musical styles and how they might
be transformed in the future. I do know that Na-
tive American music and that of other cultures has
been greatly influenced by what the missionaries
have brought into the lexicon; it is an effect that
is profound and deeply troubling to me. But that’s
the way it goes when those of us of one cultural

background hear and integrate the music of oth-
ers. We’re mimics.

What do you consider the most beautiful bird or animal
call, and can you share a recording of it?

Probably the flute-like sounds of the thrush fam-
ily... Swainson’s and hermit thrushes. I love those
sounds. But also, whole biophonies.

Listen to the Swainson's Thrush's call at
http://appendic.es/m/l

Do you think music is what makes us human?

No. That answer is addressed in the writing of the
late Paul Shepard and his book, The Others: How An-
imals Made us Human. As a matter of fact, the sug-
gestion that animals taught us to dance and sing
came directly from that source.

In our interuiew with Alexander Rose of the Long Now
Foundation, Rose discusses the Clock of the Long Now
and the concept 0/ extremely long-term thinking. Have
you thought about partnering with other sound recorders
to create a massiue database of what life on planet earth
at this moment sounds like, as a record for future genera-
tions? A sort of audio Noah’s ark?

Yes. For over a dozen years, now, I have sought out
an institutional repository for my natural sound
archive — the rarest of its kind for two reasons:
(1) because it includes biophonies recorded over a
wide span of time (1968 - present) and (2) because
fully 50% comes from habitats so radically altered
that they are either altogether silent or the biopho-
nies can no longer be heard in any of their original
form. Part of that transfer includes the establish-
ment of an academic chair specifically directed to
include a wide range of related disciplines related
to natural soundscapes, a center for soundscape
studies, and the global soundscape project.

The Appendix Out Loud

From Folklore to Exotica:
Yma Sumac and the
Performance of Inca Identity

Zoila S. Mendoza

The Voice

Born high in the Peruvian Andes, a descendant
of the last of the Incan Kings, Yma Sumac spent
her childhood literally ‘talking’ with the birds,
the beasts, the winds, the sound of life and
nature surrounding the little village of Ichocan.
While still a small girl she began taking part in
the religious services of the sun-worshipping In-
dians and became almost deified by them. Word
of her phenomenal vocal powers reached Lima,
the Peruvian capital, and an official government
delegation traveled into this remote mountain
region to see and hear what they secretly be-
lieved to be a myth.

ma Sumac, the Peruvian singer, star-
tled audiences in the United States
and Europe with her remarkable
voice, beauty, and mysterious “Inca”
princess/priestess persona. Accounts of Sumac’s
life — like the largely fictional narrative quoted
above — are full of fantasy and contradictions.
Nevertheless, this piece begins with yet another
story about her discovery: a true one. 1

Zoila Augusta Chavarri del Castillo (Yma Sumac)
and Zoila Rosa Beoutis Joffre (my mother) were
close friends during their sophomore and junior
years in high school. These two young women had
traveled from the highland provinces of Cajamar-
ca and Junin to the capital city of Lima, seeking ac-
cess to better schooling than what had been avail-
able back home. While the nun-run school they
attended was hardly elite, it does suggest that their
families had socioeconomic resources not avail-
able to the great majority of highlanders. The two
friends used to study in the house of my great-un-
cle, Alejandro Beoutis Santivanez, who hosted my
mother in Lima. Beoutis was an avid promoter of
the Andean traditions of his homeland, and his

Hear Yma Sumac perform
"Virgenes del Sol" (1944) at
http://appendic.es/m/9

house was a place of meetings for rehearsals and
preparation for participating in folkloric events.
He sponsored many highland artists who lacked
economic resources, so they could participate in
the effervescent scene of folkloric performance
in Lima. By the first few decades of the twentieth
century, rural highlanders had started to migrate
in great numbers to the cities, especially Lima,
and their increasing presence began to be reflect-
ed in the contests, religious festivals, and other
cultural elements they brought with them.

While my mother’s cousin Helida was rehearsing
for one such event in 1938, Zoila Augusta and my
mother decided to spy on the proceedings. My
aunt was rehearsing with a well-known folkloric
musician who was from the highland department
of Ayacucho: Moises Vivanco de Allende. This mu-
sician heard Zoila Augusta humming and echoing
the songs and called her saying, “young woman,
you have a splendid voice.” Zoila Augusta ended
up singing in a duet with my aunt for the upcom-
ing occasion and from then on Vivanco became
her manager and artistic mentor. He married her
in 1942.

Later, Vivanco would romanticize this ‘discov-
ery’ story, claiming that he had discovered her in
her native Cajamarca. This led to further fantas-
tic reconstructions, such as the claim that when
the government decided to take Zoila Augusta to
Lima it was “a decision that almost caused an up-
rising among some thirty thousand Indians over
the loss of their revered ritual singer.” Such exag-
gerations began to cause resentment among some
Peruvian highland audiences toward the star and
her manager-husband.

July 2013

Zoila Augusta’s folkloric singing career started
right away, whereas my mother returned to Junin
for her senior year of high school. Their friend-
ship ended after Yma’s ‘discovery.’ They would
meet again in 1957 and 2006. By 1942, Zoila Au-
gusta would start using as her artistic name Yma
Sumac (most commonly spelled in Peru Ima Su-
mac), symbolically marking her new identity as
an Inca princess/priestess. In Quechua this name
means “how beautiful” and became associated
with Inca royalty via the popular theatrical piece
Ollantay, believed at the time to be a legacy of the
Inca period.

Competing Identities

Typically, if someone in the U.S. has heard of Peru,
it is in relation to the Incas and Machu Picchu, the
archaeological site added to the list of the New
Seven Wonders of the World in 2007. While most
Peruvians proudly claim Machu Picchu and the
accomplishments of the Inca Empire as their her-
itage, they are more hesitant to envision Peru as
an Andean nation with highland people and cul-
ture at its core. Unlike other Andean nations such
as Bolivia and Ecuador, whose capitals lie at the
heart of the Andes, Lima straddles the coast. This
dichotomy between the coastal center of political
and economic power and the peripheral or mar-
ginalized highland regions has marked Peruvian
history since the colonial period (1535-1821) and
has become even more prominent since indepen-
dence. Since the 1960s, the Peruvian nation has
in most international forums presented itself as a
criollo (creole) culture, a culture that developed on
the coast mixing mostly Spanish and Afro-Peruvi-
an elements.

However, during most of the first half of the twen-
tieth century, this national identity was still in
flux. Nationalistic, populist governments, espe-
cially those of president Augusto B. Leguia (1908-
1912, 1919-1925, 1925-1929, 1929-1930), sought to
pin down and project a stable national identity.
In this context, highland regional movements at-
tempted to establish a more ‘authentic’ highland
cultural identity. Effervescent artistic production
played a key role in these movements, operating in
an internationally validated arena that had come

to be known as ‘folklore.’ Previously-scorned in-
digenous and indigenous-based music and danc-
es began to be seen as something to be protected
and encouraged. During the first part of the twen-
tieth century, the highland department of Cuzco
took a leading role in questioning el centralismo
limeno (Lima centralism) and in arguing that the
heart and identity of the nation should be in the
Andes. Cuzco artists and intellectuals had a spe-
cial advantage: in addition to being the cradle of
the Inca Empire, Cuzco was also the gateway to
the monumental site of Machu Picchu, unveiled
to the world in 1911.

The so-called “scientific discovery” of Machu
Picchu initiated a new epoch in the role of Cuz-
co and the indigenous Andes in the Peruvian and
international imagimire. Although the site is men-
tioned in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century
documents, and was known to the people living
in the area, to a great extent it was due to the ef-
forts of two American citizens, Hiram Bingham
and Albert Giesecke, that Machu Picchu became a
major focus of national and international interest.
However, it was not until the 1940s, with the con-
struction of the first tourist hotel in Cuzco, reg-
ular commercial flights coming into the region,
and the construction of a zigzagging road up to
the site that significant numbers of tourists began
traveling to Cuzco and Machu Picchu.

From the 1920s on, it is obvious that not only Cuz-
co but most folkloric music and dance adopted
the “Inca” identity in order to be validated. New
spaces at the national and regional levels were
created to promote this kind of art and Cuzco art-
ists acquired a prominent place in them. It was
in this context that Yma Sumac began her career.
She joined the “Folkloric Art” group led by Moises
Vivanco and in 1942 made her debut in national
and international radio. Soon the company would
change its name to “Imma Sumack and the Peru-
vian Folkloric Ensemble,” a clear sign of the rising
fame of the young star. In the years that followed,
the ensemble toured Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bra-
zil, and also Mexico, probably the most important
artistic center of Latin America. By then, Mexico
was the leader in music, television, and movie
production for all of Latin America; to be recog-
nized there meant great fame for artists of the
time.

The Appendix Out Loud

Because the tour to Mexico represented an
important challenge for the singer and the
group, they made sure to gather the best
artists from around Peru. They invited three
well-known popular musicians from Cuzco
to form part of the ensemble. This initiative
was ill-fated: after playing with the ensemble
in Lima, the flute player was run over by a car
and another could not travel because of visa
issues. The original amicable relationship be-
tween Yma and Cuzco artists would weaken
when she left behind traditional Andean folk-
lore in exchange for a persona that sold best
abroad.

The Transformation

Yma Sumac and Moises Vivanco arrived in
New York in 1946 hoping to enchant the
North American public with their folkloric
art. Shortly before, Vivanco had disband-
ed the troupe and formed a trio with one of
Yma’s female cousins, the Inca Taqui Trio. Al-
though Yma’s extraordinary voice and exotic
beauty always caught the attention of North
American audiences, the trio initially strug-
gled. Yma’s art needed to fit into the forms
of exoticism that the North American public
expected. Exotica was “a form of mostly in-
strumental pop music featuring orchestral
or lounge instrumentation, augmented by
Latin, African, or Polynesian rhythms or trib-
al-sounding chanting or singing.”*

It seems that Vivanco, as her husband and
manager, led Yma’s transformation. He man-
aged her musical arrangements and created
an aura of exoticism around her. By the 1950s,
Vivanco’s insecurities about his own worth
led him to exert an obnoxious and aggres-
sive dominion over her. Limansky says that

*As Yma's main biographer states, in 1950, when
Ima's first album in the U.S. was released, the horrors
of World War II "were still fresh in the minds of the
world's people [and they] were ready for diversion
... [T]his led to the growth of an unusual movement
in American popular entertainment called 'exotica'"
(Limansky, 3).

“Moises guarded Yma like a rare hothouse
flower... [Wjhether consciously or not, Yma
allowed herself to be put into this awkward
and precarious position.” Vivanco struggled
to get recognition from the public but “Yma
delivered what was expected of her because,
in reality, her talent equaled the extravagant
claims of the publicity releases.”

Yma’s voice was indeed extraordinary. While
some say that her voice range was of four oc-
taves, others, including the singer herself, as-
serted that it reached five. It seems, though,
that what impressed audiences the most were
the extremely high notes that she could reach.
While traditional indigenous Andean female
singers are known for their very high-pitched
voice, there is no doubt that Yma Sumac’s
name in Peru became synonymous with high-
pitched singing. However, her singing would
move far away from the traditional folkloric
Andean style and toward a quasi-operatic
style. Yma signaled this shift by wearing ex-
pensive gowns and adorning herself with Pe-
ruvian jewelry.

As part of the exotica movement, Yma offered
nature-inspired vocal impressions that might
be considered bizarre. As Limansky argues,

because of her distinct musical individuali-
ty, but also because of the absurdly bombas-
tic initial American publicity and promo-
tion — which billed the singer as an Incan
priestess and/or princess and relentlessly
emphasized and even overstated her vocal
extensions — Yma Sumac was almost never
taken seriously as an artist. Instead, she was
relegated to the ranks of curiosity entertain-
ers, a freak performer... [A] n isolated figure
in the annals of performing, Sumac has al-
ways had mystery surrounding her. She was
as exotic to American culture as she was
glamorous . 2

This mysterious oddity fit perfectly within
the script of the first Hollywood film featur-
ing Yma: Secret of the Incas, the movie that in-

Hear Yma Sumac perform "Jivaro" (1957) at http://appendic.es/m/c

July 2013

spired the Indiana Jones films. Yma’s role in the film
was directly related to the Inca royal persona she
had adopted. Like the exotica musical movement,
Hollywood’s representations of exotic countries,
and/or cultures embodied by artists and archae-
ological sites were readily consumed by the U.S.
public. This was the time when, for example,
Carmen Miranda came to embody not only Bra-
zilian identity but a generic “Latin” identity. Se-
cret of the Incas was shot in 1953 and premiered in
1954. Albert Giesecke, one of the two Americans
who played a key role in the “discovery” of Machu
Picchu became a key person who facilitated local
help and guidance to the filming crews.

Watch scenes from Secret of the Incas (1 954) at
http:// appendic.es/m/b

While there seems to have been a remote link to
Inca ancestry through Yma’s mother who bore
Atahualpa (the name of the last reigning Inca in
Peru) as one of her maiden names, this was greatly
exaggerated in marketing the film in the U.S. In
Secret of the Incas Yma was portrayed as a local elite
near Machu Picchu who acted as an intermediary
between the animistic, superstitious, and primi-
tive Indians in the film and the scientists and of-
ficials who were working at archaeological sites.
Her character is also a sort of priestess, making
an offering to an Inca mummy found in the site. 3

Remarkably, Yma Sumac, was never in Machu Pic-
chu — or, indeed, even in Peru — during filming.
The songs were pre-recorded, and she filmed her
scenes on Hollywood soundstages. This music is
credited in the movie and in all of her recordings
to Moises Vivanco. Any direct input into what she
was supposed to perform was either not credited
or put aside in favor of what worked for Vivanco or
for the producers.

Featuring Yma in the film was a clear strategy to
make this movie more marketable. The central
theme and the main musical performances are
interpreted by Yma, and they already display the
modifications made to her art to fit the exotica
movement. Her music sounded nothing like in-
digenous or mestizo traditional music of the Peru-
vian Andes. In fact, it seems like the filmmakers
did not want to record any of the real sounds made
by the indigenous peoples when they entered the

scenes with their ritual horns, music, or dance.
Those sounds were dubbed with an orchestrat-
ed mixture of Afro-Caribbean and other popular
exotic sounds. The Indians were portrayed as an
admiring crowd gathered around Yma Sumac,
in accordance with exaggerations about the pur-
ported deification of Yma by the Indians in her
hometown. All this despite the fact that Yma and
the Indians on site in Machu Picchu were filmed
thousands of miles apart. 4

While the movie was a great economic success
for Paramount Studios, it was harshly criticized
in Peru by highland artists and intellectuals, es-
pecially those from Cuzco. While they recognized
that Machu Picchu’s international exposure would
benefit tourism, they were outraged at how the
music distorted their heritage. After all, they had
been trying for decades to perfect this art — to put
it at the center of Peruvian national identity and
win international repute. They argued that there
was no need to insert faux-exotic pre-recorded
music given the rich musical traditions available
locally. The film’s portrayal of Yma increased the
preexisting tensions between Peruvian folkloric
artists on the one hand and Moises and Yma on
the other.

a©©

In 1957, after a scandal involving an affair and a
lawsuit, Yma divorced Vivanco and went back to
Peru for a short visit. She had been hired to per-
form by a North American Oil company in the
northern coastal town of Talara. Coincidentally,
my family had been relocated to Talara due to my
father’s military career. My mother went to see her
perform, but she did not approach her, thinking
that Yma would not remember their childhood
friendship. But Yma saw her and recognized her
and they hugged. My mother told Yma that she
had chosen Emperatriz (one of Yma’s middle
names) for a middle name for her daughter. I was
born in Talara three years after this encounter. My
mother gave me, her youngest, the first name she
shared with the star: Zoila.

Yma Sumac would finally make the trip to Cuz-
co and Machu Picchu in 1959 — the same year she
re-married Moises. Yma and Vivanco, who were
now U.S. citizens, along with their artistic troupe,

The Appendix Out Loud

went to Peru fora tour that year. Their visit was
mired in controversy. For years, Jose Maria
Arguedas, a major government official in cul-
tural affairs at the time, had harshly criticized
the style and repertoire that Yma Sumac and
Vivanco presented to the foreign public. The
artists received a particularly hostile recep-
tion in Arequipa where artists and intellectu-
als like in Cuzco had also developed their own
regional identity opposing Lima centralism.
On their arrival in Arequipa, people “whistled
and hooted rejection because with her state-
ments this renegade Peruvian [Ima Sumac]
had often made her countrymen look savage
and primitive; she may be admired for her art,
but her unworthy attitude as a Peruvian can
never be forgiven.”

Yma Sumac apparently did not have such a
hostile reception in Cuzco, and the local press
limited itself to reprinting articles or com-
menting on the rejection shown elsewhere.
According to a statement made to the press,
Ima Sumac’s first visit to Cuzco was the result
of her desire to “get acquainted with the his-
torical Inca legacy of Cuzco expressed by its
ruins as an homage to her former fatherland
and as proof that, despite her new national-
ity, she is still a ‘daughter of the sun’ and of
Inca ancestry.”

An Epilogue

Yma Sumac’s career would take several turns
in the U.S. and Europe before she passed away
in 2008. By then she had sparked the fancy of
many audiences, especially in the U.S., where
a legend was created about her “really” being
Amy Camus (her name spelled backwards), a
bored housewife from Brooking and not an
Inca princess/priestess. After her bittersweet
visit in 1959, Yma did not go back to Peru
much until the 1970s, when she had another
difficult encounter with the Peruvian public,
this time in her homeland of Cajamarca. She
had divorced Vivanco for the second and last
time in 1965 and this seems to have given
her more freedom to spend time in her own
country. Her visits in the 1970s were contro-

versial owing to what the public perceived as
her haughtiness and what she perceived as a
lack of appreciation of her accomplishments.

Her final visit was in 2006 when, thanks to a
campaign run by a fan, she received a series of
honors. She finally received a sincere recogni-
tion in her own country after a long-standing
tense relationship. At the time she seemed
frail and did not carry out formal performanc-
es. She did sing briefly with a Peruvian group
on the train while on her way to visit Machu
Picchu one last time. Needless to say, this be-
lated recognition moved Sumac deeply. 5

It was during this trip that she stopped by my
mother’s house in Lima and during a very
short visit she told her, “I want to hug you
and give you a kiss like when we were girls.”
Perhaps anticipating that it was going to be
her last visit to Peru, Zoila Augusta wanted
to retrace some of her important steps and
see the dear friend from her youth. Many of
us Peruvians, especially those of us from the
highlands or of highland descent, believe
that before departing for good, a person or
his/her soul, needs to retrace the important
steps that were taken during life. Yma Sumac
had wanted to reconnect with Peru. In her fi-
nal decades, Yma included more songs in her
repertoire that had roots in Peruvian folklore
(as is shown in the “Andean Lullaby” she sang
in a 1991 television interview in Germany). 6

Yma Sumac’s career embodied many of the
contradictions that emerge when the inter-
national desire to consume exoticism clashes
with the realities of traditional or indigenous
cultures. Yma was not allowed by her manag-
er-husband and the recording and movie in-
dustries to develop the art that led her to pop-
ularity at home and in Latin America in the
first place. It is hard to know how much she
was complicit in the transformation of her art
into the oddity that it became, but we know
for sure that it was very important for her to
be recognized back at home. It was fortunate
that this desire was fulfilled at the very end of
her life.

July 2013

Notes

i. Part of this story appeared in one of Peru’s
main newspapers when Yma Sumac passed
in 2008 (Variedades, El Peruana, November 10,
2008, 3-4).

Listen to Yma Sumac perform "Chuncho" (1953) at
http://appendic.es/m/e

Watch Yma Sumac perform "Ataypura" in Secret of
the Incas (1954) at http://appendic.es/m/g

Watch Yma Sumac perform "Pachamama" in Secret
of the Incas (1954) at http://appendic.es/m/h

5. This was signaled by a testimony that her
biographer gathered and that stated that in
any important appearances after this honor,
she wanted to wear all six heavy medals that
she had received in Peru (Limansky, 248).

6 .

Watch a 1991 interview with Yma Sumac on Ger-
man television at http://appendic.es/m/d

1 00 The Appendix Out Loud

Benjamin Breen's illustration is based on a photo-
graph of Tony Schwartz in the 1950s.

“Nancy Grows Up,” the Media
Age, and the Historian’s Craft

Michael J. Schmidt

The Challenge of “Nancy Grows Up”

It begins with anxious crying. The plaintive sound
only lasts a few moments before the screams drop
into a slightly lower register and transform into
a calm murmur. The sound repeats, then breaks
into the rudiments of language. It sings — or
tries — and falters. A man helps, playing a game
with a familiar rhyme: “Jack and Jill went up the . . .
to fetch a pail of... Jack fell down and broke his ...
and Jill came tumbling ...”

She fills in the appropriate words and, as she does,
we suddenly meet her.

For the remaining minute and forty-two seconds
we hear and follow Nancy. We listen to her de-
velopment as a person through a variety of situa-
tions: she wishes her father a happy birthday, she
lists what she wants for Christmas (“a puppy and
a whistle and a horn and a hat and a dress and a
ballerina costume”), she explains how to house-
train a dog, and she expresses her feelings about
the Russians sending the dog Laika into space.
All the while Nancy’s voice grows increasingly dis-
tinct, speaks longer, takes on and sheds accents,
and uses increasingly sophisticated vocabulary.
Finally, the recording ends, but it does so just as
we witness what seems like a personal milestone.

July 201 3 101

Listen to "Nancy Grows Up" at http://appendic.es/m/o

Nancy becomes silent just after we see the
door open on her developing sexuality. In the
last and longest of the voices, after updating
us on what she has been doing at school, she
sighs and confesses, “and I’ve been discover-
ing boys.”

Recorded over the course of the 1950s and
the early 1960s, “Nancy Grows Up” gives us a
beautiful and stimulating portrait of growth.
It is an audio montage; Tony Schwartz, its
creator, continuously taped his niece from
her first month of life to the age of thirteen
and, later, spliced together pieces chronolog-
ically. Schwartz likened what he did to time-
lapse photography: it condenses the story of
thirteen years, as Schwartz said, in less than
two and a half minutes.*

“Nancy Grows Up” is more than a simple nov-
elty piece. Poetic and expository, it reveals
a type of storytelling that has an enigmatic
intelligibility. Offering a biographical his-
tory of development, “Nancy” narrates the
phases and stages of a young girl’s early life.
It does so quite successfully and evocatively
and achieves a rich unspoken analysis in its
juxtaposition of different voices, words, and
timbre.

Confronted with the possibilities of com-
munication in “Nancy,” one can’t help but
ask, “why have historians neglected sound?”
Despite more than a century and a half of
ongoing media revolutions, historians — es-
pecially professional academic historians —
have largely worked within a self-imposed
textual ghetto. Why have historians restricted
themselves to written histories? Why only the
monograph and journal article after the ad-
vent of the photo essay, the LP record, the ra-
dio show, documentary film, and animation
short?

*The recording described above is on Schwartz's 1 970 record
Sounds of Children. Another version of the recording includes a
short introduction by Schwartz.

fin his article "The Ambulatory Archive: Santa Muerte
Tattoos as Historical Sources," appearning in The Appendix
vol. 1, no. 1, Robinson Herrera argues that historians still
"fetishize the word, particularly written documents housed in
state archives."

There do seem to be substantial reasons for
why we have continued to rely almost exclu-
sively on text. It is beyond the scope of this
piece to attempt to give a comprehensive
explanation of this phenomenon, but a few
things come immediately to mind. Text’s ca-
pacity to transmit large masses of informa-
tion, for example, is attractive. The mono-
graph and article also parallel and allow the
exact reproduction of what has been most his-
torians’ primary source: written documents.
Furthermore, the footnote, the sine qua non
of historical scholarship and the linguistic
technology for and symbol of the discipline’s
seriousness and rigor, appears almost inextri-
cably grounded in the text.*

Beginning to rethink the footnote outside
the page only seemed possible recently. In-
ternet-based publications have shown that
digital footnotes can reference sources in
more direct ways, offer more detail and in-
formation, and, possibly, shift the function of
the footnote altogether. The blog maintained
by The Appendix, for example, uses hyperlink
footnotes to immediately show the content of
a source or acquaint the reader with informa-
tion about an obscure person or organization.

Text has served historians well, but it is useful
to ask if we have missed whole modes of anal-
ysis and presentation with such a consistently
narrowrange ofmedia. How, for example, has
the primacy of text and the page shaped how
we understand and judge historical scholar-
ship as a whole? Hayden White famously as-
serted that historical interpretation is shaped
by the plot structures of particular kinds of
stories — the romance, the tragedy, the com-
edy, and the satire — but we can go one step
further: history as a discipline has also been
fundamentally structured by its medium. The
way we conceive of the work of history and,

1 02 The Appendix Out Loud

thus, the field in which history can be told
and debated are intimately intertwined with
and determined by the advantages and limita-
tions of the written word.

There is nothing essential linking history and
text. Historians can and should embrace oth-
er media in the production of history. Fortu-
nately, there are considerable guideposts for
a journey into new media; our neglect has not
been for a lack of evidence of the unique and
intriguing capabilities of other media.

The use and exploration of sound and sound
technology offer clear examples of this. “Nan-
cy Grows Up” was not an isolated piece; it was
part of a large, rich history of thinking about
and through sound in the twentieth centu-
ry. Even a brief account of sound technol-
ogy shows that there is a considerable body
of work in other media that historians could
learn from and draw on.

Looking at some of the ideas and practices
surrounding “Nancy” illuminates some of the
ways non-historians have sought to engage
sound narrative and documentation.

Telling with Sound:

A Very Short History

From the late 1920s until the early 1950s,
American radio drama, comedies, and soap
operas pioneered new ways of conveying sto-
ries and ideas through voice and other audi-
tory material. These shows worked out, in
the words of radio scholar Susan Douglas, a
mode of “story listening.” Although primar-
ily a source of entertainment, Orson Welles’s
1938 famous Mercury Theater production of
War of the Worlds — and the consequent pan-
ic that a Martian invasion was under way —
demonstrates the immense power and effect
that audio stories could wield. Welles’s abili-
ty to create hysteria and horror in his listen-
ers was a direct consequence of his “media

The cover of Tony Schwartz's 1 959 LP, The New York Taxi Driver.

Folkways Records

sense” — his talent at adapting storytelling to
his artistic vehicle.

Across the pond, intellectuals quickly used
the young technology as material for mod-
ernist experimentation. During the late 1920s
and early 1930s, German artists sought to cre-
ate a radio-specific art form, i.e., an artistic
genre that would reveal and marshal radio’s
unique characteristics. The intriguing pos-
sibilities of the ether attracted a number of
artists from outside the musical or theatrical
world; established writers like Alfred Doblin
and future film directors like Max Ophuls
and Billy Wilder produced Horbilder (literal-
ly, listening pictures) and Horspiele (listening
plays). In 1930, the avant-garde director Wal-
ter Ruttmann produced the following:

Listen to Walter Ruttmann's Wochenende (1930) at
http://appendic.es/m/q

A film soundtrack without the accompanying
picture, Wochenende is the story of a weekend.
Ruttmann had spent much of the previous

July 201 3 103

decade making “Absolute Film,” abstract
films which attempted to capture the essen-
tial qualities of the filmic medium. With Wo-
chenende, he tried to do the same with sound.
Working with new sound film technology,
he isolated the soundtrack and built a narra-
tive using a montage of noises, identifiable
sounds, and speech-fragments.

Germans were not the only Europeans play-
ing with the open possibilities of radio form.
Around the same time, Lance Sieveking at-
tempted his own experiments in “wireless
imagination” at the BBC and Italian Futurists
like Fillipo Marinetti produced music and
theater for fascist radio.

The ether was not only used for fiction and
modernist abstraction, however. Radio jour-
nalists also produced documentary news pro-
grams. By the late 1930s, broadcast journalism
had supplanted newspapers for immediate
news coverage in the United States, and most
Americans on the home front experienced
World War II on a day-to-day basis through
listening. Radio journalism employed all
sorts of sounds — location noises, sound ef-
fects, monologues, and dialogues — in order
to move audiences between “informational
listening” (taking in facts) and “dimensional
listening” (where, for example, “people were
compelled to conjure up maps, topographies,
street scenes in London after a bombing”).

Others, like Paul Daharme, Sir Oliver Lodge,
and Rudolf Arnheim, wrote and theorized
about the possibilities of the disembodied
auditory content of radio during the interwar
period. For many, the ethereal and mysteri-
ous qualities of radio could foster outlandish
hopes and fantasies. Daharme and Lodge,
for example, believed that the ether granted
access to new psychological and metaphysi-
cal spaces. Daharme, a French advertiser and
experimental radio practitioner, believed
that broadcasting could reach directly into
the unconscious and radio works could pro-
voke a psychoactive space in which individu-
als would encounter their own theater of the
mind. Lodge, a pioneer in radio technology
and revered British scientist, argued that the
ether comingled with the realm of the dead
and that broadcasting could be used as a spir-
itualist tool to communicate with lost love
ones.

Arnheim stayed a bit closer to the ground.
Like Daharme and Lodge, however, he was
also fascinated by radio’s ability to detach
sound from image. After years thinking about
images as a film critic, he wrote Radio: The Art
of Sound. In it he pondered the power of iso-
lated sounds and the audio-specific methods
through which radio could tell stories.

The liner notes to Tony Schwartz's New York

After their introduction in 1948, long playing
records provided new materials and resources
to explore the story-telling and documentary
capabilities of sound. In addition to being
repeatable, LPs had a distinct advantage over
radio: their multi-faceted presentation for-
mat. Record producers and designers could
use the non-aural parts of the LP — the label,
cover, photos, and liner notes — to guide the
listener’s perceptions and stoke their imag-
ination. Ever the brilliant pioneer, Schwartz
made a number of innovative narrative and
representational experimental recordings for
Folkway Records, including An Actual Story in
Sound of a Dog’s Life, New York 19, Nueva York:
A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers,
and The World in My Mailbox.

1 04 The Appendix Out Loud

“Nancy” was an intersection of techniques
developed in radio and on LP. Originally pro-
duced for Schwartz’s show Around New York
on New York Public Radio, he reworked and
released it more than once on record. First
appearing as “History of a Voice” in 1962 on
You’re Stepping on My Shadow: “Sound Stories”
of NYC, he re-presented it as “Nancy” on Re-
cords the Sounds 0/ Children in 1970. Although
utilizing the same base recordings, they told
their story a bit differently: “History” utilizes
voice-over narration like a radio news piece
while “Nancy” edits together sounds in a way
similar to Ruttmann. Both were packaged
with a cover and notes.

During the period that Schwartz released
“History” and “Nancy,” other LP projects ap-
proached history more directly. In the early
1960s, for example, Time-Life released The
Sounds of History, a twelve-volume set of re-
cords that intertwined short explanations
of events, readings of documents and liter-
ature, recordings, and contemporary music
to evoke sonic portraits of important eras in
the history of the United States. Later in the
decade, torch singer and Batman star Eartha
Kitt helped record narrative biographies of
important African Americans in the two-vol-
ume set Black Pioneers in American History.

The largest engagement with telling history
on records during the period occurred, not
surprisingly, in the sphere of music. Some
did it within music itself — ambitious albums
like Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige
or the Kinks’ Arthur (Or the Rise and Fall of the
British Empire) attempt to paint large historical
shifts through suite-like musical assemblag-
es. Others used records to present the history
of music through documents; record compa-
nies, for example, offered overviews of musi-
cal genres by collecting together and chrono-
logically ordering recordings. These projects
could become quite ambitious — the most
cursory and expansive collection of this sort,
the 1962 record collection 2,000 Years of Music,
tried to capture “a concise history of the de-
velopment of music from the earliest times
through the 18th century” on four LP sides.

The cover of An Actual Story in Sound of a Dog's Life, 1958.

Folkways Records

“Nancy” and the
New Work of History

This is a just sketch, but it gives us a sense of
the wide range of work that has been done
exploring the narrative and communication
possibilities of sound technology before the
digital age. They demonstrate the ample re-
sources and precedents to which historians
might turn and build on if we wished to ex-
pand beyond paper and the PDF. Despite this
extensive engagement with sound as a nar-
rative medium, however, these experiments
and treatises have largely taken place outside
the historical discipline. Sound creators and
thinkers have remained outliers and outsid-
ers.

This non-engagement with sound seems
surprising, given the significant place that
speech plays in the profession. Historians
have taught through lectures for centuries,
and conference presentations have become
an expected part of membership in the pro-
fession. These forms of audio scholarship
have not been engaged as ‘works’ of history,
however, unless published in journals or in
edited volumes. It is quite possible that uni-
versities’ insistence on written scholarship
as the litmus test for academic success has

July 201 3 105

played a crucial role in the centrality of the text
within history.

But what might sonic forms of historical schol-
arship look and sound like? How can historians
marshal these forms to tell history? This question
remains largely unanswered at the moment, and
this openness is full of exciting possibilities.

Listening to “Nancy” once again in another con-
text may give us some hints, however. Let’s listen
to the final segment of it, along with something a
little more:

Listen to the Radiolab episode "Time" at
http://appendic.es/rn/ r

In 2007, “Nancy” was used in its entirety in the
Radiolab episode “Time.” Radiolab and other public
radio programs like This American Life have built on
the foundations of sonic thinking and experimen-
tation outlined above and embodied by Schwartz
and “Nancy.” These programs remain most Amer-
icans’ contact (if they have any at all) with the
legacy and form of these sonic experiments. Al-
though it is not strictly concerned with history,
Radiolab consistently employs sophisticated ideas,
arguments, and narratives from current historical
scholarship. The discussion of time employed as
part of their discussion of “Nancy,” for example,
is indebted to cultural histories of the standard-
ization of time like Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The
Railmayjourney.

Radio and sound recordings are not the only
vehicles that we historians have excluded. The
other media that seem most obvious for us to
embrace — television and film — have also been
pushed beyond the disciplinary pale. Ken Burns’s
documentaries and the History Channel, for ex-
ample, are seldom considered part of the scholarly
conversation and are often seen as non-specialist
intrusions into “serious history,” despite their for-
mative impact on the popular imagination of the
past. Incursions by historians into other types of
media — like the film version of Natalie Zemon Da-
vis’s The Return of Martin Guerre or Niall Ferguson’s
multi-episode version of The Ascent of Money — have
been relatively rare and are often conducted or
spearheaded by people not considered part of the
scholarly community.

The main point is not that all historians need to
begin making sound documentaries, but that
there are rich resources outside the text that
we have neglected. Sound recording is but one
device. Indeed, my own experience within the
classroom has demonstrated that historians are
increasingly moving towards multi-media pre-
sentations within teaching — using music on You-
tube, photographs, blogs, and film footage — both
to expand the range of sources and to try to en-
gage students through the media that are the most
familiar to them. Scholarship should follow suit.
The increasing move towards the digitalization of
academic work — as PDFs or online books — is an
incredible opportunity to begin to rethink the his-
torical work. At the same time, it could allow us to
dialogue with audiences that are receptive to Errol
Morris’s documentaries and podcasts of Fresh Air
but who find academic monographs tedious or
difficult to approach.

If we accept Walter Benjamin’s argument that
perception and communication are historical
and formed by their social and technological con-
texts, then historians are lagging behind. Creat-
ing scholarship has long required that historians
learn the art of writing; there is no reason that the
historian’s craft could not begin to include a flu-
ency in other technologies and media. If, as histo-
rians, we took such a turn, we could open up new
horizons for historical scholarship and begin to
speak a language more attuned to a larger public.

Editor’s Note:

For a related exploration of ‘sonic forms of his-
torical scholarship’ see Amber Abbas’s “For the
Sound of Her Voice” on page 13 of this issue.

1 06 The Appendix Out Loud

Rules of the Tribe:
Hardcore Punks and
Hair Metal in the 1980s

Chris A. Smith

The chant began less than two minutes into the
first song. An undercurrent at first, just a few
hecklers. But it got louder with repetition, each
wave building on the last. Soon the chant threat-
ened to drown out the band itself.

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

It was tough to take. But it was entirely in keeping
with everything else about this disastrous tour.
The angry crowd in Long Beach. The broken-down
van in the Sonoran desert. Sixteen tickets sold
in Portland. Now, onstage in San Francisco, the
members of Discharge — the fastest, meanest,
most uncompromising English hardcore punk
band of the 1980s — must have wished they were
somewhere, anywhere else.

It was quite a comedown. On the band’s previ-
ous North American tour, in 1983, Discharge had
played sold-out shows to thousands. Up-and-
coming thrash metal bands Metallica and Slayer,

We suggest this recording of the ill-fated 1 986 San
Francisco show as a soundtrack while you read. You can
listen at http://appendic.es/m/l

both of whom would be headlining arenas soon,
cited the group as a prime influence. Iconic punk
fanzines like Flipside, which could make or break
reputations, pronounced them “fucking great.”

But it was 1986, and a new era was dawning in
underground music. Punk’s energy was waning,
and metal was on the rise. Many punk bands were
moving toward a more metallic sound, melding
their radical politics and D.I.Y. approach with
metal’s musical chops and low-end heft. For some
bands the transition went off without a hitch. For
others, though, it was akin to choosing sides in a
civil war. Discharge, one of the most influential
bands in punk history, chose wrong.

July 201 3 107

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pw jpf ' -

d Y

Back in San Francisco, the band skidded to a
halt twelve minutes into the set. The singer,
Cal, attempted a bit of bravado to counter the
booing: “I love it when you talk dirty!”

Nobody in the audience was fooled. Out be-
yond the stage, the crowd was a roiling sea
of leather-jacketed anger, a mosaic of jeering
faces and raised middle fingers. San Fran-
cisco, like every other city in America, hated
Discharge.

©a®

At first, Discharge didn’t stand out from the
legions of punk bands that sprang up in the
wake of the Sex Pistols’ incendiary 1977 de-
but. Indeed, the group’s first demos are filled
with Pistols-esque songs of non-specific re-
bellion. The recordings sound like the work
of bored teenagers, which is exactly what they
were. The band members, working-class kids
from the provincial town of Stoke-on-Trent,
had a good idea of what their futures held — a
succession of crappy jobs or a life on the dole,
punctuated, perhaps, by nuclear annihila-
tion. Punk offered an outlet.

The first wave of punk burnt out quickly. By
1980 Sid Vicious was gone and the Clash was
branching out into reggae. Punk, the media
declared, was dead. The guys in Discharge
felt betrayed by their heroes, as this 1980 in-
terview with the fanzine Grinding Halt demon-
strates:

G.H.: What do you think of all the original
punk groups now then?

Cal: There’s none left now, they’ve all either
sold out or split up, there’s only a few bands
left now who’re any good.

Rainy: They were good then, but now they’re
shit...

Abandoning its Pistols-worship, Discharge
began forging its own path. In the process, as
Ian Glasper recounts in his history of English
punk, Burning Britain, the band helped kick off

punk’s second wave.

Musically, punk’s first wave hadn’t been all
that far removed from regular rock’n’roll.
“God Save the Queen,” with its hummable
melody and simplistic chord changes, is
clearly a relation, albeit distant, of Chuck Ber-
ry and the Rolling Stones. The difference is
in the attitude, in Johnny Rotten’s adenoidal
snarl.

Discharge’s revamped version of punk bore
little resemblance to anything that had come
before. It was faster, harsher, and often al-
most entirely lacking in melody. The riffs were
generally three-chord affairs, but they were
played at warp speed, accompanied by a rum-
bling bass and a merciless, galloping drum-
beat. The songs rarely topped the two-minute
mark. As Garry Maloney, who drummed on
some of the band’s best recordings, explained
to a ‘zine called Trakmarx, “We just embraced
speed — the concept — not the drug — took it
to its logical limit.”*

The vocals, meanwhile, weren’t anything like
Johnny Rotten’s. Cal’s hoarse barking just
sounded angry. His lyrics, anarchist jeremi-
ads against government oppression and nu-
clear war, were like nihilist haikus, delivered
without metaphor, nuance, or humor. Here’s
the entirety of “Is This To Be,” from the band’s
seminal 1981 EP, Why:

Scorched earth is all that’s left
Where trees and flowers once grew
A trail of destruction
Death and destruction

Nothing left but wasteland
Littered with human flesh and bone
A trail of destruction
Death and destruction

Soon, as Glasper notes, Discharge was top-
ping the UK’s independent charts and making
waves across the globe. Even reviewers who

*The band casts a long shadow over heavy music, but
historical documentation is surprisingly sparse online.
Much of what there is can be found on this lovingly curat-
ed site: http://discharge.yolasite.com

July 201 3 109

*1 grew up loving punk and metal in suburban Detroit in the 1980s, and
I sang in a hardcore band. We generally played as fast as possible, and
everything we did tended toward entropy. Most of our songs collapsed
in on themselves in the end, as people cursed and pounded on walls and
threw things across the room.

Mostly we played our own juvenile compositions, but we also covered
Black Flag's "Gimme Gimme Gimme." Our version wasn't any good, but it
seemed conceivable that if we practiced enough, it could be one day. The
song had plenty of breathing room, gaps between notes and beats. It was
approachable. I loved Discharge, but it never occurred to me to suggest
playing any of its songs. Discharge was monolithic, too dense and dark,
somehow, for our half-assed homage.

fThe music video for RATT's "Round and Round," in which the band ruins
a stuffy black-tie dinner, encapsulates the essentials of the era. (Watch the
video at http://appendic.es/m/7.)

We begin at the dinner, with a collection of country-club types daintily
sipping white wine. (Weirdly, the late comedian Milton Berle plays two of
these roles: lord of the manor and, dressed in drag, his wife. Berle's neph-
ew was RATT's manager.) The band sneaks past the window and begins to
play, loudly, in the attic.

Vocalist Stephen Pearcy, decked out in tights, a black headband, and
proto-Uggs, does lazy scissor-kicks and plays air-guitar, while drummer
Bobby Blotzer twirls his sticks. Guitarists Warren DeMartini and Robbin
Crosby sway in choreographed motion. Plaster falls from the ceiling into
wine glasses. The guests make faces of uptight displeasure. The gothy-look-
ing daughter— who, we begin to suspect, is wilder than she seems— goes
upstairs to investigate.

When the solo comes around, DeMartini crashes through the floor and
lands on the table, to the horror of the assembled guests. We rejoin the
daughter as she slinks up the stairs to the attic, shedding her conservative
clothes and tiara along the way. By the time she reaches the top, she is
utterly transformed: a vaguely punk-looking model in a ripped silver mini-
dress. As the song fades out, she begins to dance for the band.

hated the music couldn’t help but admire the
band’s uncompromising attack. “I certainly
never wish to listen to this record again when
I’ve completed this review,” a critic wrote in
Sounds magazine. “And yet Discharge are the
very best of their kind. Their energy, as we
used to say in ’77, is amazing.”*

A short video shot in Toronto in 1983 captures
the band’s live show in its heyday. Cal, sport-
ing a soaped-up mohawk, stalks the stage like
an apex predator, swinging the microphone
and hanging over the stage’s edge to bait the
crowd. His neck veins bulge as he screams.
Pooch, the guitarist, and Rainy, the bassist,
stand stock-still to either side of Cal, spike-
haired golems, while the strobes flash behind
them. Garry anchors the attack, pounding
out a racing, relentless drumbeat. The cam-
era cuts frequently to the crowd, which in its
writhing resembles a human storm pattern.

At this point in its career, Discharge was hard-
core royalty, the keeper of punk’s true flame.

It was a dangerous place to be.

When Discharge returned to North Amer-
ica three years later, in the summer of 1986,
a new trend was sweeping the music world.
All of the heat and light was focused on the
Sunset Strip, in Los Angeles, on glam metal
bands like Poison and Dokken. “Cock-rock”
(as detractors termed it) was rock’s worst
excesses made audible — spandex-clad and
empty-headed, interested solely in partying
and getting laid. But it was catnip to record
label executives and ubiquitous on MTV. Un-
derground groups of all stripes hopped on the
AquaNet and cocaine bandwagon. 1

Glam metal was the antithesis of everything
Discharge stood for. Bizarrely, though, Dis-
charge had gone glam, too. Its new album,
Grave New World, abandoned the brutal min-
imalism that had defined the band’s sound.
The new stuff was twice as long, with hooks

1 1 0 The Appendix Out Loud

Discharge in their glam metal phase.

Discharge, Grave New World (1986)

that sounded like Aerosmith outtakes and
guitar solos best measured in geologic time.
The lyrics remained substantive, tackling is-
sues like drug addiction. Unfortunately, Cal
delivered them in a nearly unlistenable wail,
grasping at notes he couldn’t quite hit.

Moreover, the band had a new, markedly un-
punk look: bird’s-nest hairdos, dangly ear-
rings, mascara. The band photo on the album
said it all: the anarcho-punks had become
poodles with shiny, well-conditioned coats.

Reviews were unkind, to say the least. The
punk website Kill From the Heart summed it
up, declaring the album “a sad testament to
fucked priorities and bad judgment.”

Nowadays, punk and metal bleed into one an-
other to such an extent that there’s often no
practical difference between the two. Punks
are still less likely to have hair and more likely

to play fast instead of slow, but that’s about
it. Within a few years the genres would hardly
matter.

But in the mid-1980s the two sides were just
beginning to feel each other out, and there
was plenty of tribal animosity — think cats
and dogs, skiers and snowboarders. For
punks, purity was all. The Oakland band
Neurosis was banned from Berkeley’s Gilman
Street punk club when it began playing more
slowly and using keyboards.

A 1986 column for MaximumRockNRoll, the in-
ternational punk bible, illustrates the doctri-
naire punk view. “What is just so dangerous
about metal?” an English crust-punk wrote in
a scene update. “Well, I can’t say I come into a
great deal of contact with it, but on the occa-
sions I have (not looking for faults), I’ve been
amazed, even disgusted, at what I’ve found.”
Don’t be fooled by the sonic similarities, he

July 201 3 111

warned. Metal is reactionary stuff, and best avoid-
ed altogether: “Approach with caution and not
glassy eyes.”

It was a losing battle. Even then a new scene was
taking root, composed of bands that combined
punk’s politics and attitude with the complexity
and weight of metal. It was a seamless process for
bands like C.O.C. and Cro-Mags, both of whom
were rooted in hardcore culture but had a metallic
sound, using slower tempos and chunky-sound-
ing guitars.

Few bands, however, overhauled both their sound
and look as significantly as Discharge did. Fewer
still modeled that overhaul on Motley Criie.

00©

By the time Discharge’s van rolled into San Fran-
cisco, the band had been on the road for weeks.
The first show, in New York City, set the tone for
the whole tour. As Jim MacNaughton, a 46-year-
PublicCollector old New York scene veteran, remembers it, angry

punks bought cans of Budweiser from the bar and
hurled them, unopened, at the band. Another in-
dignity followed: the singer of another legendary
hardcore band, the Bad Brains, allegedly climbed
into the balcony lugging a garbage can full of wa-
ter then dumped it onto Discharge’s heads.

*Most of my description of the Farm comes from Wilson, but I also
used Gimme Something Better, an oral history of Bay Area punk by
Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor.

In San Francisco, the band was slated to play the
Farm, a cavernous warehouse wedged between
looping freeways in a rundown, industrial part of
the city. It was a punk club, a chaotic place where
punks and skinheads and metalheads regularly
fought each other, along with the Latino gangs
that held sway over the neighborhood.*

That night a crowd of a thousand, most of them
punks, had packed into the club. There’s no video
of the show, but thanks to Nate Wilson, the propri-
etor of a blog named True Punk & Metal, we have a
complete audio record. The then twenty-year-old
metalhead taped it on a Walkman, perched on a
bench near the soundboard.

Word traveled slowly back then, mostly via ‘zines,
so many people didn’t know about the band’s
transformation. It was obvious, though, as soon
as Discharge took the stage: tight leather, span-

112

The Appendix Out Loud

dex shirts, pouffed-up hair. According to Wilson,
a surge of disgust ran through the crowd. “We all
just went, ‘Ugh — they look like posers.’”

Discharge kicked things off with a new song. With
the benefit of perspective, it’s not that terrible of
a song. Cal’s caterwauling voice remains a tough
sell, but the band sounds vital, and the rhythm
section swings with an appealing looseness. It’s
sinuous and a bit sleazy, more like Guns N’ Ros-
es’ sidewinding “Mr. Brownstone,” which would
be released the following year, than the plodding
hair-metal epics of the day.

But on this stage, in front of this crowd, it was
heresy. Worse, Cal had adopted some new, suspi-
ciously rock star-ish moves, high-stepping around
the stage, wagging his finger like Mick Jagger. Wil-
son says, “He looked like a less athletic David Lee
Roth.”

On the tape, you can hear the first boo a mere 33
seconds into the song. The “Fuck Yous” took over
shortly thereafter. They rolled through the crowd,
petering out for a minute then returning even
louder the next.

The end of the second song, nearly eight minutes
in, elicited a weak cheer, a few claps, and a robust
chant of “D.R.I.” — a local thrash band on the rise,
which had played earlier that night.*

That might be when people began throwing gar-
bage, a steady rain of beer cans and anything else
that wasn’t nailed down. Discharge stubbornly
kept playing.

Five minutes later, following an audible
“smack” — a beer can hit its mark, perhaps — the
guitarist stopped playing. The rhythm section
continued for ten more seconds, then the whole
thing fell apart. The band walked off the stage, to
the loudest crowd roar of the night.

For the next fifteen minutes, a succession of
Farm staffers and scene guys harangued the
crowd. “Man, you guys are a bunch of fucking
closed-minded idiots!” one yelled.

But still the booing.

Original tape recording for the 1 986 concert, which you can
hear through the embedded audio in the beggining of this
article.

True Punk and Metal

Poster for Discharge's ill fated 1 986 show.

True Punk and Metal

*Wilson, who knew D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) from the San
Francisco scene, says that members of the band carried a trash can to
the front of the stage and threw garbage at Discharge while it played.
In a comment posted on Wilson's blog, D.R.I.'s guitarist Spike denied
that he had anything to do with it. His wording, however, didn't rule
out the involvement of other members of D.R.I.

July 201 3 113

Finally, after two-thirds of the audience had left,
Discharge reemerged. “Everyone settled down
now?” Cal asked.

Alas, no. They made it through two more songs.
The hail of garbage never ceased.

When Discharge left the stage for the second and
final time, it had played a total of nineteen min-
utes. Wilson says that Cal was crying.

©s©

There’s something admirable — and also a little
nuts — about the band’s perseverance. Others
might have packed it in after the first few shows,
but Discharge soldiered on, facing the abuse each
night. Maybe some concerts went well, and fans
loved the band’s glammy turn. If so, there’s no re-
cord of it.

A video shot in Winnipeg near the end of the tour,
the week after San Francisco, offers a glimpse of
how Discharge was holding up. Garry, the drum-
mer, and guitarist Stephen “Fish” Brooks submit-
ted to a pre-show interview with a couple of so-
licitous Canadian punks. Cal, who probably bore
the brunt of the loathing, was nowhere to be seen.
Fish, who has ratted-up yellow hair and ripped
jeans, drinks beer, drags luxuriantly on a ciga-
rette, and talks about groupies. He appears un-
fazed by the hostility. Garry, who wears his hair
in a sleek ponytail and considers each question
seriously, wants to explain it all — not just to his
interviewers but, I’d guess, to himself.

Watch the first part of the Winnipeg interview at
http://appendic.es/m/2

Watch the second part of the Winnipeg interview at
http://appendic.es/m/3

He begins in a defensive crouch. The band’s new
sound, he insists, is just an extension of the old,
and the only difference is that they’re better mu-
sicians now. The interview moves on to other
topics, but Garry returns to the subject, trying to
scratch an itch he can’t reach. “We got out expect-
ing all the people who used to come see us before,
maybe to have changed as well, like the natural
progression that we had,” he says. “But instead we

had nothing but trouble at the shows.”

Many fans, he laments, expect the band to keep
playing the same old songs. “We do a few early
tracks still,” he says, frustration in his voice. “But,
ah, it wasn’t enough.”

Garry seems wounded, and genuinely puzzled, by
the unfairness of it all. And he’s right. You can’t
preserve a sound — or a scene, for that matter — in
amber. But those were the ironclad ways of the un-
derground. As MacNaughton, the New York scene
veteran, says, “It’s about the unwritten rules of the
tribe. You don’t change.”

000

The band broke up after the tour. Cal, still follow-
ing his hard -rock muse, assembled a new lineup in
1990 and put out two more albums that are almost
as reviled as Grave New World. During this time the
band appears to have played a lot in Japan, the last
refuge of fading rock stars. There’s plenty from
this period to disturb purists: a 1991 concert vid-
eo, for instance, shows a shirtless Cal crawling
through his guitarist’s legs during a song.

It wasn’t until 2002 that a quorum of original band
members regrouped to make a record. (A version
of the band is active today, but didn’t respond to
emailed requests for comment.) Titled simply
Discharge, it was the closest thing to the band’s
“classic” era since 1983: the songs were short and
punishing, and Cal didn’t try to sing. Discharge
had finally come home.

Even through the darkest days, though, Dis-
charge’s legacy was growing. Indeed, it set a tem-
plate for generations of heavy musicians to come.
Big-name metal bands like Metallica, Sepultura,
and Slayer have been tireless proselytizers, cover-
ing Discharge songs and introducing their punk
heroes to legions of young listeners.

More importantly, the band’s galloping drumbeat
spawned its own hardcore subgenre, “D-Beat.” In
the years after Discharge’s ascension, thousands
of bands from Brazil to Japan adopted not only
that drum beat but, in some cases, Discharge’s
minimalist aesthetic, right down to the black-and-
white graphics and the font of the band’s logo. Ev-

1 1 4 The Appendix Out Loud

ery big punk band has imitators. Nobody else
has a subgenre.*

A few years ago, the Swedish band Dissober
gave “Grave New World” the proper D-Beat
treatment. Half the length and twice the
speed of the original, this take is a short,
sharp, circa-1982 shock. As one YouTube
commenter put it, “This is what this song
should’ve sounded like.”

000

On a wet night last November, I went to a
punk and metal show at a squat in West Oak-
land. Black-garbed people smoked cigarettes
and swigged PBR in the courtyard, huddled
against the elements. The performance room
was damp, moist from rain and body heat
but still cold, somehow. A couple of muddy
dogs chased a rubber ball through the crowd,
ducking under legs and skidding into walls.

A local D-Beat band named Old Crow be-
gan tuning up. After a blast of feedback, the
guitarist looked up from his Flying-V. “You
should get the dogs out,” he told the crowd.
“We’re really loud. It might hurt their ears.”

*AII D-Beat might sound the same to the uninitiated, but Discharge's heirs
come in many different flavors. In addition to the sonic and graphic mimic-
ry, many D-Beat bands have named themselves by adding the prefix "Dis"
to an astonishing variety of words— a sort of hardcore Mad Libs. Some,
such as Disrupt, actually make sense. Others, like Disrape, are utterly non-
sensical and probably tongue-in-cheek. See the videos in this paragraph
for some examples.

The fever hit earliest and biggest in Sweden, with
hundreds of bands taking up the D-Beat mantle. Anti
Cimex was one of the first and best. Though deriv-
ative, its sound packs a wallop, and is influential in
its own right.

Watch the video at http://appendic.es/m/4

He wasn’t exaggerating. The drummer set
off with a loping D-Beat. The guitar joined
in with a series of chugging barre chords. By
the time the vocalist — hirsute, extravagantly
tattooed, cargo-shorted — began shouting, a
small pit had formed in front of the band. The
sound hit me in my solar plexus, just the way
it was supposed to.

I surveyed the room. There were crust punks
in black hoodies and vests, metal dudes with
long hair and flannel, hipsters with messen-
ger bags draped over their shoulders. Lots of
people wore beat-up jackets covered with the
patches of their favorite bands.

Disfear, also from Sweden, holds down the rock-ori-
ented end of D-Beat. Listen to the chorus: slow it
down and take away the screaming, and you've got
a rock'n'roll song.

Watch the video at http://appendic.es/m/5

Besides Sweden, Japan might have the greatest
concentration of D-Beat bands. Combining the
Discharge sound with Japanese hardcore's predilec-
tion for noisiness, D-Clone follows the thread to its
logical endpoint— faster, uglier, and ultimately more
feral than the masters themselves ever contemplated.

Watch the video at http://appendic.es/m/6

On the back of one, written in that iconic,
sloping white script, was a familiar name:
“Discharge.”

July 201 3 115

Curcu\ionidae: Scolytinae.

A Parasitology of Sound

Veit Erlmann

The following text is an example of the kind of entry I mould
like to include in a Bestiary of Sound that I am currently
working on. The idea of the book comes from medieual and
early modern bestiaries, many of which contain descrip-
tions of the most/antastic, neuer-seen or not-yet seen crea-
tures. Ojten lavishly illustrated, these marks appealed to
early modern readers’ sense of the marvelous, but they also
encouraged them to do something profoundly modern: to
take risks in the pursuit of the unknown. My own bestiary
is a similar attempt to establish the most unlikely of con-
nections between organisms, things, and sounds in hopes
of thinking about the world in novel mays. Like the entry
on the bark beetle belom, all entries are structured around
the idea that in order to represent sound as a cultural form,
me must evoke more than an acoustic uersion of established
master narratiues.

0©0

he notion that seemingly simple
acoustic phenomena — the sound of
a voice, a chord — might be useful in
clarifying otherwise obscure matters
is among humankind’s oldest. From a divine ut-
terance that brings the world into existence in the
Judeo-Christian tradition or the cosmology of the
West African Dogon to the vibrating membranes
of string theory — the universe is made of sound.

Yet sound can also function in a very different
kind of epistemology, one that resists the urge to
explain complexity by tracing it to a first cause, as
in Laplacean physics, Cartesian rationalism, or
Kantian idealism. An example of this is the en-
tomological study of climate change: the study
of how the environment is shaped not by humans
but by beings like the small insects of the Curcu-
lionid ae: Scolytinae species, commonly known as
bark beetles.

A high resolution photograph of a bark beetle.

Vitezslav Manak, via Wikimedia Commons

Bark beetles have long been
suspected of posing the sin-
gle most daunting threat
to the boreal forests of
North America and Siberia.
Researchers also know that
much of the massive spread of
these humble creatures is due
to climatic factors.

^ Pro-
longed
periods of
drought caused by
global warming render
these forests suscepti-
ble to infestation. The
ensuing deforestation in
turn releases enormous
amounts of CO2, which had
been previously sequestered
by healthy trees. This, in turn,
increases the greenhouse ef-
fect, which creates favorable

conditions for rapidly growing populations of in-
sects, which infest more trees, which .... A per-
fect feedback loop that composer David Dunn and
theoretical physicist James P. Crutchfield picture
thus:

Solar
Energy

Yet feedback loops are more than self-reproduc-
ing systems. They tell us two things: first, new
patterns of behavior are not owed to the actions
of single agents as much as they emerge from the
interaction of several actors. Second, complex in-
teractions such as the bark beetle-climate change
loop are inherently unstable and unpredictable.
Under normal conditions they may ensure the sta-
bility of ecosystems. But by the same token such
loops may also lead to situations in which even
small causes may have catastrophic effects.

There have been numerous attempts to upset the
loop and to bring beetle infestation under control
through pesticides and pheromone traps. So far
these initiatives have met only with partial success.
Yet more effective strategies against deforestation
and resulting climate change may soon become
available. The bark beetle, Crutchfield and Dunn
argue, possesses remarkable bio-acoustic capabil-
ities that might contain the secret to combatting
beetle infestation. Some varieties of bark beetles,
such as the North American pinyon ips (Ips confu-
sus), are equipped with a sound-producing organ
located at the back of the insect’s head and that
is activated by means of a plectrum on the under-
side of the prothorax. While we may reasonably
assume that the beetles use the clicks they pro-
duce in this manner in order to coordinate attacks
on trees, their bio-acoustics are part of a far more
complex feedback loop. With the help of specially
designed “microphones” that are inserted into the
trees, Crutchfield and Dunn found that decaying
cells of dying trees produce acoustic emissions in

the ultrasonic spectrum. Bark beetles, they specu-
late, might “hear” these sounds and decode them
as meaning “food.”

If there is any merit to this hypothesis — and it is
a hypothesis after all — our feedback loop would
have to be expanded by more than an additional
acoustic factor. Since communication systems
only function within a frequency range that par-
ticipating organisms can produce and perceive,
the social system of bark beetles could be far more
complicated than is generally assumed. Combat-
ting climate change thus requires more than mor-
al appeals or more efficient technologies. We need
a new thinking about the boundary between man
and animal. Who we are and what binds us to all
the other creatures of the planet is no longer part
of an overarching discourse in which animals al-
ways figure subservient to Homo sapiens.

The bark beetle may have yet another lesson in
store. Sound and music may no longer be sub-
sumed under conventional discourses of truth
based in only one field of knowledge. As a para-
site, the bark beetle reminds us that a new mode
of inquiry is required to think about people, ani-
mals, or music in times of global climate change:
a parasitology of culture perhaps. Western phi-
losophy’s desire for certainty, for the most part,
entailed the identification and suppression of the
parasite, the troublemaker, and of noise; the bark
beetle allows no such easy classifications. For who
is the parasite here? The tree? Man? Or the beetle?

Lafontaine’s fable of the town mouse and the
country mouse comes to mind here — and Michel
Serres’s The Parasite along with it. In the book, the
thinker of mingled bodies wonders what happens
to relationships of dual exchange when the para-
site enters the equation. The parasite is not a new
being, it is the complete blurring of boundaries
between entities: between host and guest, subject
and object, cause and effect.

But also those boundaries between artist and
work. The artist is a parasite of his own work that
in turn feeds on him. We do not speak a language;
language speaks us, as David Dunn’s extensive
oeuvre shows. The San Diego-born composer has
been active in sound art from as early as the 1970s.
But in contrast to the appropriation of natural

July 201 3 117

Sonograms of beetle chirps recorded by David Dunn for his field recording The Sound of Light in Trees.

David Dunn

sounds in experimental music and sound art,
Dunn sees his works as a re-contextualiza-
tion of such sounds. In The Sound of Light in
Trees, for instance, he correlates the acoustic
“signature” of specific tree regions, the densi-
ty of beetle infestation, the life cycles of trees
and the condition of their phloem layers.
Music thus becomes a strategy among others
to preserve forms of communication akin to
human language. As such, it shares certain
features with the communicative forms of
other species. Intelligence is not the exclusive
feature of a single species, but an emergent
quality of larger ecosystems comprising many
species. In short, music and natural sounds
are part of a feedback loop.

The equivalent of this microcosm of rustling
leaves, wind, and beeping beetles is a tranquil,
almost brittle “soundscape” whose charms do
not become immediately apparent. We strug-
gle to break through the sharp line at the heart
of what we call music and that separates the
animal-like, inhuman from the human. The
point, according to Dunn, is not to double
nature musically, as in most post-Aristotelian

aesthetic thought, but to grasp the acoustic
interdependence of nature and human sonic
labor as part of processes that resist unambig-
uous attributions of sound to one or another
ontology — of Man, music or nature. The dif-
ference between humans and animals is as
much due to the violence we do to the latter
as the differentiation between natures sounds
and music is itself part of the mastery of na-
ture.

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